Fort Apocalypse is a little more than just a clone to Choplifter.
Graphics: 8
Sounds: 7
Value: 5
Tilt: 8
When I first viewed Fort Apocalypse my initial impression was that ‘here comes another Choplifter clone’. Well, you really cannot blame me for this as it’s becoming a reality that if one game succeeds then you will come to expect many more clones. Take a look at Space Invaders or Pac Man you’ll see what I mean. However, and thankfully (after some groaning) Fort Apocalypse proved to be a better-quality game over Choplifter and to my surprise was actually developed earlier than Choplifter yet due developing issues it was released to the market at a much later date.
As you may come to expect, the premise Fort Apocalypse is pretty much the same as Choplifter; that is to drive your helicopter (in the game it’s referred to a Rocket Copter) into the Draconis caves to save in total sixteen men over two levels. After saving these chaps it’s time to blow up Fort Apocalypse located in the Crystalline Caves and then exit to safety. And just for the record, I didn’t make up any of these names.
If you have played Choplifter, the controls for Fort Apocalypse are quite similar. You can move your ‘Rocket Copter’ left, right, up and down and able to shoot left/right and straight down depending upon where you are facing. However there are some slight differences to Choplifter that made this game a little more challenging. The Rocket Copter does react to gravity (that is depending upon the level determines how heavy is the pull) and there’s abundance of obstacles to shun/shoot at (e.g. teleportation, force fields and blowing up mines to name a few). Other things to take care of are the amount of fuel left and the timer.
Graphically Fort Apocalypse does look sleek. The chopper itself appears impressive and that nice added touch of the rotor blades is pretty cool. The enemy tanks all have that impressive glow and there are plenty of good sprites explosions. Fort Apocalypse also has a fine array of colours (that was lacking in Choplifter) and plenty of sounds to boot. Sounds from the whirling blades of the Rocket Chopper to the explosions of tanks and mines to that very cool (albeit short) opening musical score already illustrates that Fort Apocalypse is technology far superior than Choplifter.
However the short coming of this game is the length. Fort Apocalypse is a very short yet hard game to beat. It only has two (yet expansive) levels with plenty of firing and dodging. The actual level design is quite exciting as there are landing pads, fuel depot and requires a little tactical thinking so this somehow counteracts the short game play. There are even four levels of difficulty and the main differences between them are the gravitational pulling and the speed of the enemies. Just to add further, I have read an interview where the game designer Steve Hales response to why Fort Apocalypse is a short game.
“Originally, I had planned for fifty levels. But since we wanted to put it onto a cartridge instead of disk, I only had room for two. I spent almost two weeks working on compression methods, but could only get two levels. The ROM was only 16K and I believe there were only a few bytes left.” I can accept this!
So, even though that on the surface that Fort Apocalypse maybe a clone for Choplifter, once you dig a little deeper (and thankfully I did) you’ll come to realise that it’s not really a clone but something more. It was due to the developer’s decision to make Slime first that Fort Apocalypse was put on the shelf for a temporary time and fortunately Steve Hales decided to release Fort Apocalypse later on that year. So if you are a fan of Choplifter or enjoy movies like Blue Thunder you will not be disappointed with Fort Apocalypse.