Hostage: Rescue Mission

The Good
For years, this was the only game remotely like this available - a tactical squad assault simulation. First you had to position your men in doorways where they could be used as snipers, then rappel your other team down the wall, and then break into the building to rescue hostages. You could freely switch between all three team members within the embassy, as well as the three snipers. This led to some interesting possibilities, like intentionally shooting out the windows early on and just picking terrorists off from afar. All in all, a truly great game for the day.

The Bad
As the other reviewer noted, it just couldn't handle being truly real-time. There were some weird places where it paused, such as when you start firing within the building. (I never saw this as too much of a problem - if you're letting loose with a machine gun a 5-foot range, things aren't going to turn into a shootout. Whoever fires first, wins) And unless you got REALLY creative, the snipers were virtually useless. It was quite difficult to tell the hostages from the terrorists. And the step-by-step 3D could sometimes be disorientating, but that's typical of games of the time.

The Bottom Line
Groundbreaking game. It probably could have been a bit better, but for years this was a completely unique - and enjoyable - piece of software.

The Good
Hostage is a fairly simple game. Basically the idea is to re-take a criminal (terrorist?) controlled building and rescue as many of their hostages as possible.

You control a SWAT team consisting of three snipers and four "entry men" who will go inside the building. You move from person to person using the function keys, and then move them with the joystick. The two teams work in very different ways.

The game starts with you attempting to place the snipers in position around the building by running down a street, one at a time. In this portion of the game the view is a 2D side view where you attempt to move the men from the left side of the screen to the right, with city buildings as the backdrop. Lights from the building are being shone down onto the street, and if your sniper is seen in one of them they will be fired on. Pressing the fire button on the joystick makes then tumble to avoid the shooting. Eventually they will reach the building you want them in (from a selection of three) or be killed trying.

Once that phase is done you can see the rest of the team helicopter-drop onto the roof of the main building. Once in place they move to various locations on the building and start to rappel (rope down) from the roof, stopping at the top of the building. You can select these men and move them down the side of the building, eventually picking a location where you have them jump in through the window. This is where the snipers come in handy, as the entry team rappels down the side you'll see people walking by the windows who will kill them if they attempt an entry or simply move past the window. You can switch to a sniper and pick them off.

When the team is in mos of the game becomes centered on them. From there you find yourself switching from person to person, to a main map showing everything that's going on. Your members run through the building from "hot spot" to spot, this isn't a real 3D game where you can move to or look anywhere.

The hostages are spread out around the building, and when you enter the room there is often a terrorist who will shoot at you. Once you kill them the hostage will follow you, and you can collect them in rooms. When this is complete you end the mission.

Skill levels increase the difficultly in a number of ways. In the easy mode you can simply snipe away at anything you see, but in higher levels the hostages will be walking behind the windows too. In addition the terrorists will start walking about the building, so simply moving the hostages to a single room won't always help.

The Bad
The main problem with this game is the obvious non-realtime nature of the game. Start firing your gun, for instance, and the game basically stops. This makes it easier than it should be because you can enter a room and start firing, never allowing the enemy to shoot back. Worse, you have unlimited ammo!

Another issue, one that's more difficult to explain, is the "modal" behavior. You start in "sniper move" mode and then into "guys drop on roof mode". At the same time the game is switching from a 2D to 3D view. Then once everything is going it becomes more "real" in that you move from player to player to map and so forth. It would be a better game without these initial modes, it should have started with everyone in place.

And then just an annoyance... why do they shoot at my snipers running far below, but don't bother blowing away the guys landing on the roof? Again, this obvious issue would have been solved if the game started "in place".

The Bottom Line
Well it's no Rainbow Six, but it was certainly a lot of fun to play.

The Good
Its difficult to wax on about this game, so I'll just say it this way - this was a terrifically fun 3D game in the era before Castle Wolfenstein 3D. The idea of switching between the various team members added a definite flavor to the game, and in the Atari ST version at least, leading the hostages to the safe room gave it a bit of a strategic flare.

The different skill levels really effected gameplay. At lower levels the enemy would walk in front of windows, allowing your snipers to pick them off before entering with the rest of your team. At higher levels, hostages also walked in front of the windows, so this simply didn't work any more. This greatly added to the replay value.

The Bad
There were a couple of things that bugged me, but the big one was that there was no action between the mini-phases. For instance, the game opens with you running snipers into position, a relatively simple task. Once that's done, its as if nothing happened, the terrorists didn't respond to this action. More obvious was the way you could just leave your men standing around while you controlled another one, while the terrorists could move about, they couldn't while you moved, so it was somewhat moot. The most egregious example was that when you fired, you could move your gun but there wasn't enough time left over for the computer to do anything else - so you just held down the trigger and fired and pulled the gun around in complete safety.

The Bottom Line
A retro gaming classic that everyone should try.

The Good
This is a very early Amiga game, yet still to date one of my favorites. After booting, the very first thing you see is a street, and immediately, you hear the screeching sound of a car abruptly braking and terrorists run out of it. The game plunges you right into the setting: It is a strictly no non-sense affair. Except for the brief selection box where you choose the difficulty setting, no more game elements appear. No main menu, no "game over" screen, no high scores (or even scores). It's brilliance in game design in terms of atmosphere.

Terrorists have overrun an embassy, your mission is to take them out (or otherwise defuse the situation) without harming the hostages.

The game itself is basically made out of two sub-games: In the first part, you have to get your three snipers from the starting point to three possible positions from which they can snipe. Getting just one to any location will get you to the second part, but the more positions you cover, the better you can snipe the target in the second game. Going to the positions is not that easy as spotlights are sweeping the streets, and terrorists will open fire on you as soon as they see you. Obviously, some positions require you to run farther, putting you at higher risk of getting shot.

Part two is introduced by a short animation sequence showing your other three team members rappelling onto the top of the embassy building. Now you can choose between two actions: Using a sniper to scope one side of the embassy and take out hostages as soon as they appear in a window, or rappel down the embassy and intervene.

The game is then a semi-first-person shooter. However, it's more a business of finding the terrorists and killing them rather than a mindless keep-shooting matter. You can also rescue the terrorists (kind of Counter-Strike-style) by leading them to a certain room in the building.

This indoor sequence is incredible in terms of atmosphere. A silent music plays in the background and picks up as terrorists approach.

In the second part, all "actors" play together: If one of your men in the building walks to a window, your sniper can see his silhouette (and, of course, shoot it). You can also take out your men as they rappel down the embassy, if you feel like it.

It's fun. It doesn't really sound exciting when you read about it, but this game has a certain edge to it.

The Bad
Well... unfortunately, the formula kind of gets boring after a while. The first stage isn't too hard, you can get at least one sniper to the easiest spot, and that's all it takes. Most of the time, you'll do most of the action inside the building anyways. Walking in the embassy and chasing terrorists is cool, but the embassy is always the same map and not too big, so before too long you've seen it all. The different difficulty level don't make much of a difference either.

The Bottom Line
It's a great game and I've enjoyed it a lot. You'll abandon it after a while... but after some time, you'll pick it back up again and start playing again. As I mentioned in the introduction, I love the straightforward approach of this game. It's solid but not drowned in useless gadgets and gimmicks. Just a good game.