Heavy Barrel - Thoughts

Data East's Heavy Barrel is an aged, unflattering polaroid of the NES era. Though it's stylistically closer to Ikari Warriors than Jackal, I think drawing a comparison with the latter game will better punctuate my thoughts on this janky adventure. I wouldn't deign to call a terrible game, but it's plagued with an ugly aesthetic, baffling design choices, and periodic moments of sheer boredom. Whereas Jackal is laser-focused on its strengths as a fun experience, Heavy Barrel is muddled, its strengths diluted down into a lukewarm puddle of "eh."

I praised Jackal highly for its variety of stages that took you through colorful yet down-to-earth territories swarming with entrenched foes. Heavy Barrel on the other hand cares little for realism, preferring bright, clashing colors and large mechanical bosses. The abstract nature of the game isn't a knock against it—Rygar is fun largely due to its nonsensical enemies—but I doubt anyone would label Heavy Barrel as a "looker". Stages are bland and forgettable, merging into one another due to a lack of a cohesive theme for each level. Sure, one stage might have mine cart tracks or a blue elevator ride, but... so do other levels later in the game. You'll basically be ping-ponged between outdoor areas and techbases until you inexplicably find yourself squaring off against the final boss.

The shooting in Heavy Barrel is serviceable on paper: it provides a nice blend of enemies to put down and powerups to collect. You have a rapid fire machine gun to use against a majority of the opposition, with anything more durable (tanks, turrets) requiring explosives... provided that you can land your shots. The grenades add a hint of skill to the gameplay but they're far from a good weapon; their long arc and delayed impact can only be described as "bothersome", especially considering how little damage they do.

But for the most part, Heavy Barrel provides the player with plenty of mindless fun—so long as there are things to shoot on screen. Once you get to the aforementioned blue elevator ride, the action grinds to a halt for minutes at a time, the enemies spawned being easily countered and dodged. I'm usually undisturbed over how ubiquitous elevator sequences are in games, but only insofar as they continue to provide gameplay. Heavy Barrel's snail-like descents are just a glorified shooting gallery that might amuse you the first time through, but become very obvious ammunition (and time) sinks on replays.

One bad section that repeats itself several times isn't enough to outright ruin the game, but it's a major annoyance that stands out among Heavy Barrel's other numerous flaws; other issues blotting the game only become apparent the more time you spend playing it. Chief among these is that enemy attacks give the player little time to react, rockets fired from tanks guaranteed to decimate you should you find yourself in their crosshairs. Whereas Jackal can be beaten with vigilant thumbs, Heavy Barrel opts for shameless memorization, especially when flame grenadiers start getting thrown into the mix. That can still be fun in its own little way—it's pretty invigorating to finally make it past a difficult section unscathed—but most of the time it's vexing due to the sudden, unavoidable deaths. Plus once you're trained to start blasting spawn points, the game becomes sapped of most of its replayability.

Compounding the muck of memorization is Heavy Barrel's power-up system, which serves to highlight just how good Jackal is by keeping things simple. There are two primary weapons, three separate grenade abilities, and an elite superweapon that requires five pick-ups to activate (and you know you'll have acquired it when your character shouts so loud your speakers blow out.) It's a solid amount of diversity for a top down run 'n gun game, but in almost all situations you'll want the flame shot and flame grenades, as both of these have wide attack zones that are able to pierce enemies.

It's not a huge problem to have unbalanced weapons in your video game, but what makes it worse is when it's impossible to parse which ability you're acquiring. Spending a key to open up a power-up cache yields a single square sprite that is used for every power-up in the game, meaning that if you're hunting for more parts to your superweapon, you could unintentionally swap out your stack of 99 flame grenades for the dinky whirlwind attack. And since the weapon caches are not randomized, the winning strategy is to memorize which boxes hold the flame shot and then straight-up ignore the rest of the boxes until you die. Yes, even hilariously large superweapon is not worth the risk of turning your grenades into those silly stationary whirlwinds.

I'm probably overly-harsh on Heavy Barrel due to Jackal still being fresh on my mind. To be fair to Data East, I think the key mechanic for opening weapon caches is really clever: you're allowed to hold up to four keys in reserve, creating tension between saving keys for opening boxes after you die or blowing your key reserve in anticipation of finding more superweapon parts. I also feel that manually destroying the trapezoidal gates at the end of each level—while repetitive—provides a small, satisfying pat on the back. But Heavy Barrel is not an experience I'd recommend to anyone other than the biggest NES nerds whom have already been conditioned to view the warning of "memorization required" as a selling point. Heavy Barrel may be plenty playable, but its problem at the end of the day is that you have to twist yourself into knots to call what's playable "fun."