Captain Skyhawk review - Nintendo Entertainment System

An evil empire has arrived from outer space and is threatening to conquer the entire Earth! They've already dispatched battleships to build massive installations on the planet's surface, and have infested the land with attack craft! Earth's defence controllers are more than a bit miffed about this and have summoned the elusive Captain Skyhawk for help.

Captain Skyhawk's the hunkiest hero available, and is also a bit of a dab hand when it comes to flying an F-14 Tomcat. He's also got his own customised, souped-up F-14 fueled and ready for instant use. His ship can hover in mid-air like a Harrier jump-jet, travel into space like a Space Shuttle, and carry more weapons than a B52 blanket bomber!

His main objective is to destroy the four installations that the enemy have created, but there's loads of sub-missions in the game that Skyhawk must carry out before he can claim to be victorious!

What the Mean Machines staff thought

Rare aren't usually ones to disappoint when it comes to Nintendo games and Captain Skyhawk is yet another example of a brilliant game. The graphics are excellent, the sprites are varied and well-animated (especially Skyhawk's F-14) and the backdrops are brill. The sound's decent as well with accomplished tunes and spot-on effects. But it's the playability that counts and Captain Skyhawk is simply superb! The inertia on the F-14 is excellent, and the gameplay is very challenging with loads of levels to conquer. I particularly like the level where the wings stay swept back, and Skyhawk has to negotiate the landscape travelling at super-sonic speeds without crashing! To be perfectly honest, Captain Skyhawk is one of the finest NES action games out - and it's certainly the best Nintendo game I've played since Snake, Rattle and Roll.

Captain Skyhawk is one of the smoothest and fastest blasting games I've seen on the Nintendo and I love it! The up-the-screen sections are very challenging, with hazards whizzing by beneath you and things to blast on the ground. At top speed you really have to rely on your reflexes to guide you around the hills and through the rather thin valleys without crashing! The other sections add plenty of variety to the action, and the end result is a brilliant-looking, reaction-testing blaster with loads of high-speed action.

Have your say about this review

Laurie - 19 Sep 2008, 08:54 GMT

The rather lazy title aside, this was a welcome addition to the Nintendo NES. Yet again, Rare excelled themselves (one can only imagine what it must have been like to work for them) and the boundaries of the machine with ultra smooth scrolling and superb sprites. This would remind one of an early arcade game but with far superior playability thrown in with a defined game progression. As usual, the gameplay is on the difficult side of difficult. Not by any means the best game on the NES, nor indeed by Rare, but worth playing nonetheless.

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