Operation Wolf
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Player Reviews
Average score: 3.3 out of 5 (based on 26 ratings with 2 reviews)
A salute to Chuck Norris and his legacy of blowing up jungles.
The Good
Probably the earliest hit of the genre, Operation Wolf is THE original rail shooter. A cult hit that garnered a modest success when released on the arcades with those plastic little uzis as controllers.
The premise behind the game is as simple as you'd guess, bad guys are doing bad stuff!! Go! Kill!! ARRRR!!! Yes, that's what we like anyway so why bother with anything else? Perfect to kill time and relieve some stress by mindlessly cleaning the world of central-american drug dealers, islamic terrorists and all sorts of paramilitary evils. In all, a perfect shooting gallery game, with all the features that would become classics of the genre like the missile/knife deflection via gunfire, the idiotic hostages/civilians that have no better idea than to run right in the middle of your line of fire, and "missions" that boil down to shooting the hell out of everything that dares to enter the screen as it scrolls around the different locations that make up the game. The enemies appear as nice looking bitmaps that usually go down with a shot or two of your two available weapons: the usual main shooter, an UZI and a high-powered grenade. The interesting addition to the gameplay comes in the form of finite ammo for both of your weapons, which forces you to be on the lookout for ammo bonuses as well as the usual health power-ups.
Additionally the port to DOS was quite good, keeping all of the action-loaded gameplay and it's graphics, which look about the same as in the arcades except for the gigantic status bar that eats up almost a quarter of the screen.
The Bad
The sound got horribly botched, I remember digitized samples as well as much more thumping sfx instead of the wimpy bleeps present in the DOS port, though those later may have been my arcade memories acting up.
Aside from that there's nothing else that you can object against Operation Wolf except the fact that it's really a dumb and simple 80's rail shooter, it gets old really fast and you could easily find something better to do with your time than playing it. After all it's the videogame equivalent of (and was inspired by) those cheesy "exotic" action movies of the 80's like Rambo 2 or the Delta Force series, were a one-man-army (usually Chuck Norris, Micheal Dudikoff, Lorenzo Lamas, etc.) shoots and kills dozens of colombian/vietnamese bad guys in mock jungles that look more like someone's backyard with a couple of shacks thrown in...well, you get the picture. They are a funny diversion if there's absolutely nothing else in the entire world for you to do.
The Bottom Line
A good port of a classic of the rail-shooting genre. I leave it up to you to figure out if that's a good thing or not. For what it counts Operation Wolf delivers the same non stop action that made it such a hit in the arcades and while that isn't enough to get a nomination for "Best game ever" it still makes for a funny arcade diversion, you know, in a "Chuck-Norris-vs-5000-Colombians" kinda way.
DOS · by Zovni (10504) · 2003
Typical Coin-Op port that probably did better in the arcade
The Good
Killing people and blowing stuff up. I guess thats the premise of this game. There are innocents to kill and lots of vehicles to destory. Get those silly medics! What are they doing in the crossfire anyway!?
The Bad
Two weapons, machine gun and grenades. All there really is to do is watch your ammo levels and after a while all you have to do is memorize when a helicopter or tank is going to come through and your ready. The game is static and linear. Don't expect too many suprises. Only 6 levels? Come on.
The Bottom Line
An exactly replica of the arcade version. The only difference is you are using a controller instead of a mounted uzi. For this reason alone, I say go with the arcade game. At least there I feel like Rambo!
DOS · by MaiZure (59) · 2003
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Critic reviews added by RetroArchives.fr.