What if the battle of Midway had lasers? If I ever had to describe 1943 Kai by Capcom, that would be my answer. Not to say that it’s not an interesting thought, but that’s pretty much all that’s really interesting about this game. Considering that back in the day, most video games were set in space and shooting against aliens, 1943 Kai goes in a different direction. Course if it still looks like a duck, quacks like one, you still have another average space shooter taking place on earth. What’s probably worse though is the complete lack of originality this game brings to the screen. Essentially you are going through the same two stages with 4 different color palettes over and over again. The 2 stages are terribly boring over all, and honestly falls off to become more of a chore of a game then something fun. The game mechanics are rather confusing as well. While the game is still very much a shooter like Galaga, the game adds a few more things that just ruins a simple formula. For one, the health bar on the bottom appears to go down despite taking a hit or not and even more so when equipped with certain weapons. This really becomes counterproductive overall, but it is something I suspect is left over due to the way arcade games work. What seems to make matters worse though is the fact that power ups are often messy pick ups and are often hard to predict when you can actually get them or what you will get from them. Really this game isn’t worth the small amount of time and effort it takes on unlimited credit to begin with.
Final Thoughts:
1943 Kai really is a terrible shooter overall, and is just a testament to the ye old arcade days. While repetitiveness and cheap difficult were exciting in the ’90s; none of the charm is there for 1943 Kai and is best that this game is left forgotten.