Cliffhanger

For fighting action, rent the movie. For snowboarding action, check out this game. It'll make you wish for packed powder and more snowboarding levels.

It's frustrating to breeze through the fighting only to deplete your lives on a single snowboarding stage. Another issue with those stages is how the mountains in the background look like giant mounds of soft-serve ice cream! The audio is definitely improved over the Genesis version with clear grunts and a soundtrack that reminds me of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Cliffhanger on the Sega CD isn't great, but if you're a fan of games with snow themes, this one could keep you busy for many hours.

The action is mainly a side-scrolling affair, but there are a few unconventional stages that let you scale the side of a mountain or run from an avalanche (please kids - don't try this at home). Fighting bad guys with punches and kicks seems pretty boring at first, but there is some technique involved in defeating gangs of converging thugs. It helps if you can grab their knives and machine guns to use against them. The worst parts of the game are those that force you to make difficult leaps, in which one false move will cost you a life. With the exception of those tricky areas, I actually enjoyed playing Cliffhanger. There are continues available, but they sometimes take you way back to the beginning of a stage! My buddy Eric has actually made it to the final showdown with Qualen, and he says it's well worth the effort. So keep making those leaps of faith!

Sylvester Stallone's early '90s mountain action flick has a so-bad-it's-good appeal to it, and in that respect the game definitely lives up to the license. Of the many ports of Cliffhanger released at the time, the Sega CD version reigns supreme with truly awful-looking clips from the movie, a CD-quality soundtrack, and crotch-hammeringly difficult snowboarding sequences on par with the Battletoads hover bike level.

Although you get fight scenes, harrowing jumps, and chase action, Cliffhanger's uneven game play will keep it from being a smash.

Der "Cliffhanger" hat vor allem mit dem stupiden Spielablauf zu kämpfen. Schon nach wenigen Minuten langweilt das ewig gleiche Faustkampfritual, das zudem oft in Unfairneß abdriftet. "Cliffhanger" ist solide und profes- sionell gestaltete Fließbandware, die nur wenig Spaß bringt.

Fair graphics but poor animation. Very choppy gameplay. Poor control and lack of variation in enemies. Uncreative; poor man's Double Dragon.

Overall, if you want to experience all of the action of the movie, just rent it and watch it again. Maybe you could hold your control pad and pretend to be Stallone beating up the baddies. It would definitely be more fun.

Stallone's movie becomes a sub-standard beat-up-the-bad-guys game following the same plot. Control is sluggish and you can't save your progress, so it gets frustrating.

Surtout que la Super Nintendo n'a pas manqué d'excellents beat'em up, Cliffhanger se plaçant haut la main comme l'un des plus mauvais. Alors si vous tombez sur un test qui lui donne ne serait-ce que la moyenne, vous pourrez en rire autant que du jeu lui-même, car son auteur lui se moque bien des jeux vidéo.

In the end, Sony Imagesoft has made another lackluster movie tie-in, but at least this time there's a few nice things to say about the game, and it doesn't have half the glitches as Dracula. Once I beat it (which can be done in under an hour, assuming you use the lives cheat), I knew I would never touch this one again. Decent movie clips and nicely done (but too hard) snowboard sections save this from being a total disaster like Dracula, but it makes me wonder how poor the Genesis version must be. Action fans in need of a great movie based game should get the Terminator and steer clear of this mess. I always liked Arnold better then Sylvester anyway.

This might have made a decent (if overly generic) entry into the beat-em-up genre, but in the process of trying to add some "value" and mix things up, they blew it. Just about everything falls apart when you realize you have no chance of seeing the finale. This is almost notable for showing off some mode-7 effects, but you can see it done far better in games like "Soul Star." This is one of the few games that has no redeeming value.

It amazes me how developers can screw up formula games. Take the side-scroller; you have hundreds of examples demonstrating clearly what works. You have a mold of general rules, clear cases of what plays best - practically a damn template of how to make a good game. Yet designers still take this template, start to fill in the blanks... then ignore the rules and fuck it all up!

Naturally, you're also expected to make a series of obligatory "leaps of faith". But the worst aspect of Cliffhanger is its unforgiving avalanche stage where you have to run through an obstacle course of trees and rocks with a wall of snow bearing down upon you. It's not unusual to breeze through dozens of fights without a scratch, only to use up every last one of your lives on this single frustrating stage. Yes, you can continue, but that takes you all the way back to the beginning of the game! There's no password either! Cliffhanger's graphics are pretty mediocre, although the bass-heavy background music isn't bad. This Genesis edition is so fast and responsive that the SNES version almost seems sluggish by comparison. But when a game is this unforgiving, the added speed is just a detriment. Note: Despite what the box claims, this game is one player only.