My time with Alpha Mission II - Neo Geo's neglected & glistening shmup gem!
>For context, I'm 42 years old and a lot more patient than I used to be with older games. But only if they don't waste my time; I've no desire to return to AAA gaming and resume 10-12-hour marathons late into the night. In lieu of such, I've found myself going back to my roots in arcade gaming, hence my hype for the upcoming AES+.
(Played in single-player MVS on PS4.)
One of the most flabbergasting realizations I've had when I search online, is that there's been a serious dearth of well-needed, in-depth reviews of Alpha Mission II. Mostly, this game has been covered and skimmed over, if not outright dismissed, by many Neo Geo gamers with no regard for the genre; some of the most embarrassing reviews have come from fighting-game enthusiasts, just looking to review everything on the Neo Geo in the most one-and-done manner possible. It's a shame, because they've been missing out on what I believe is the Neo Geo's most mechanically deep and rewarding shmup.
In this case, it's a two-layered shmup, divided into air enemies and ground enemies, with the ability to fire shots and drop missiles to deal with each, respectively. But, unlike the influential Xevious, your ship has no ground-attack reticle for you to guide; instead, ground shots automatically close the distance to an enemy up to about a third of the screen's height, allowing you to bring your ship right above a grounded enemy and blast away quickly. It's refreshing not having to worry about marking ground units to destroy them, considering how busy you'll be kept with everything happening on screen at once.
Standard power-ups come in the following forms:
- 'S' for Speed, up to 5 levels.
- 'L' for standard Laser, up to 5 levels.
- 'M' for ground Missile, up to 5 levels.
Every item drone starts by dropping 'S,' but if you shoot the 'S,' it makes the item bounce upward and change to the next power-up, 'L,' and so on. The cool thing is how, once you've maxed out your three main items, item drones will start dropping inverted item letters, which will drop your max level in the given stat. It can be very useful if you've accidentally over-powered your ship's speed, for example, but also a danger by de-powering your weapon levels, so you have to be careful! You can also find the all-important 'K,' which retains all your ship's power-up levels after one death, and make sure to pick up as many 'G's as you can, which are different amounts of gold to be used in the post-stage shop between levels, as explained later.
AM II is also a 4:3 vertical shmup, usually a big no-no among genre fans, who make the argument that it places a bigger restriction on reaction time due to dealing with downward scrolling at the sacrifice of the screen's height. What makes this viewpoint work so well in AM II is for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the speed at which stages scroll: not too fast, but not too slow. It's even been designed with a bit of edge-scrolling freedom from side-to-side, which helps with dodging and item collecting. The coolest part? There's two items available to either warp you ahead of the Area by several screens ('W')... or reverse you ('R') back the same for more scoring opportunities! (That is such a cool addition for a shmup, even 35 years later!) And secondly, the balanced size of your ship and corresponding hitbox: just enough to thread the needle-volleys of enemy fire, but not so pea-sized as to breeze through without effort. It's a kind of bridge-gap between the later bullet-hells and former traditional shmups of old.
Speaking of the ship, AM II has some smartly-coded dynamics of behaviour between its power-ups and shields. Here, they are known as Armour, doubling as special weapons & protective plating, pre-loaded into a free-use menu (opened with the 'C' button) that can act as either and both during gameplay. You can even collect Armour pieces on the battlefield to equip in your menu, but only by collecting three pieces in a row--destroy the sequence, and you're back to square-one. What gives the Armour some risk-and-reward is that by attaching your selected Armour, it will increase your ship's size. So, you'll get some serious firepower and protection... but, like Slap Fight, you'll increase your ship's hitbox!
There are 11 Armour weapons available to you in AM II, each with their own uses. Some Armour is dedicated to air fire (Laser, Bubble), some dedicated to ground destruction (Homing, Shotgun), some will even do both (Fire, Nuclear) and others will absolutely decimate everything in their path (Phoenix, Thunder). All Armours require Energy to use, with a corresponding bar on the side to indicate how much you have left. Energy will deplete upon using Armour fire or taking enemy fire (which saves your ship from death), but the cool part is that when Armour is activated, item drones will drop nothing but 'E' items, which replenishes your energy by one gauge. There are even 'E's of different colour, which will replenish even more energy gauges at a time, one even to the max!
After every Area is complete, you'll receive a percentage of gold up to 100% depending on how much "air space" from the completed stage is "under control." (I haven't yet figured out what that means or how it works... is it akin to the boss destruction rate of Radiant Silvergun?) This will be added to the total of gold you have collected during the stage. Then, you'll have a brisk 10 seconds to quickly choose which Armour(s) you would like to buy for your in-game menu before diving into the next Area.
EDIT: Gl0wsquid helps clarify!
>["Air space under control"] refers to how many of the Xevious-style cores and radar dishes you've destroyed.
And there's more than meets the eye to both the controls (Type A and Type B) and the difficulty settings. Type A controls are beginner-friendly, where the 'A' button shares all firing duties of shots, missiles and Armour weapons. Type B, known as 'Advanced' controls, splits both shot & missile between 'A' and 'B' buttons with their common Armour counterparts, which helps you to save your active Armour energy against tougher foes when you have a dedicated one (air or ground) attached. It's incredibly dynamic, but it also takes practice to memorise which button fires what during play. Believe it or not, it's easy to forget differentiating between the two buttons, not to mention the lack of autofire. (I've always found that autofire, for all the complaints I've heard about sore hands & fingers, is a lazy way of concentrating too much on ship movement danmaku-style and not on the purpose of your firing, which looks ridiculous in so many playthrough videos online when they don't stop autofiring, even in unpopulated sections of the stage. Just hold down one button and "go.")
Unlike the majority of difficulty settings in shooters, where all that's done is an increase in enemy fire and call it a day, AM II's actually increases the amount of enemies, as well! So, where in Level-1 you would face several enemy ships sent at you piecemeal, in Level-4 they are entire enemy formations! And boy, do the enemies of this game love to swoop in from every angle and keep you on your toes. Even ground turrets have no compunction over firing on you from below! But, no matter which difficulty you select, the game's gradual ramp-up (aside from Area 4's easy boss) is an excellent reminder of how important difficulty balancing is. It's surprising how, even when Powerup Syndrome rears its head after death (without a 'K'), how possible it is to climb back in later Areas, given the open nature of its design. This isn't the kind of shmup that encourages destroying everything in sight with no escapees, but one where player smarts can outmanoeuvre swarms of formations and enemy fire to gradually power your ship up and give them back what you've been getting.
Visually, AM II is clean and uncluttered, even in its most challenging sections. Ship & enemy designs are distinctive and beautiful. The animations are no slouch, either; the light effects are cool (like on the surface of Area 2's monster ship), the after-burners firing off whenever you move your ship ahead, and even parallax scrolling makes a welcome appearance. But, the one thing that impressed me the most was how easy it is to tell between foreground and background enemies, unlike other shmups that dropped the ball hard in that respect (Sol Cresta). It cannot be overstated how important that visual distinction is in a two-layered shmup: to telegraph to the player the difference between air and ground in a multi-layered shooter. (And they did it all without yellow paint!) It's one of those small details easily taken for granted if you're just plowing through the game without any thought or care.
Sound-wise, the most impressive part is the music. A variable treat for the ears, from rockin' little melodies to ominous layers of foreboding, it could be easily argued that AM II has the best soundtrack of the early Neo Geo releases, fore-to-aft. The sounds suit the game's visuals well, from some nice explosions to wild lightning effects. Very pleasing.
Even amongst its peers, from overlong bore-fests like Zed Blade and Ghost Pilots, to hard-as-nails Pulstar and Viewpoint, to anime key-jingling in Twinkle Star Sprites and Blazing Star, nothing compares to Alpha Mission II, the little gem that could. I mean, can you name any other Neo Geo shmup that goes as far in offering the player more variety in their personal approach? Can you name any other Neo Geo shmup that is as flexible & variable in its scoring? Can you name any other Neo Geo shmup where difficulty makes a truly marked difference between levels, forcing the player to drastically change their tactics? Folks, the replay value here is off the charts!
Shockingly modern in its designs and pleasing in its aesthetics, Alpha Mission II wears its old-school influence proudly, but without falling into the pitfalls of its progenitors. Refreshing, mechanically diverse, challenging, and beautiful to hear & behold, it has enough of its own personality, mood and engaging gameplay to make it the Neo Geo's proto-answer to Taito's later masterpiece, Rayforce.
A fine-wine 9 out of 10. And a top-three Neo shmup, for me.