Amiga Power


Operation Wolf

Publisher: The Hit Squad
Machine: Amiga 500

 
Published in Amiga Power #1

Operation Wolf

This is ideal budget fare really. A famous name (one of the most famous, in fact) limited gameplay but, it has to be said, lots of action. This is the original olive drab shooting gallery game, with oodles of enemy soldiers, tanks, jeeps, helicopters and the like leaping up or zooming out in front of you, and only your quick reactions saving you from being sent back to the title screen in an inglorious amount of time.

It's the game the term 'genocidal' could have been invented for - admittedly the odd nurse, pig and Vietnamese-like civilian crops up who may not be such a brilliantly good idea to aim at - but the basic gameplay is very much of the shoot-everything-in-sight variety.

In a historical context, Operation Wolf is mainly noteable for the fact that it used such big, arcade-like sprites and had so many on the screen at one time - it looks a bit scrappy today perhaps, but you have to admit it still works.

Operation Wolf

Sufficiently similar to the coin-op to do it justice, it's really marred only by a tedious amount of disk swapping - surely it wouldn't have been too much effort to squeeze it all onto one disk? At this price, it's a bit of a steal, and suddenly makes all similar rivals (Line Of Fire et al) still at 25 quid look stupidly overpriced.

We'd perhaps wait for the superior two-player sequel Operation Thunderbolt to make it onto budget, but there's no way you couldn't call this a good buy.

The Bottom Line

You know exactly what you're getting here and, within its limits, it doesn't really put a foot wrong.