Airborne Ranger

The Good
Airborne Ranger is an interesting game with varied gameplay. It's an early attempt at creating a military-themed action game that incorporates elements of stealth (don't worry action fans; in some missions you can still live out your Rambo fantasies). Compared with popular arcade shooters of that era like Commando, 1942 and Ikari Warriors Airborne Ranger offers infinitely more gameplay options & variation. For example, a typical mission in Airborne Ranger consists of 3 phases:

1. Outfitting your supply pods. In this section you select which weapons you put in your 3 supply pods depending on the mission briefing you've read earlier. For example if a mission is very tough you can decide to include extra first aid packets that heal you. Each type of weapon has it's own amount of weight. A LAW rocket has a weight of 6, which is six times as much as the weight of a carbine mag. A supply pod can contain up to 21 weight units so you need to make some trade-offs.
2. Dropping your supply pods & parachuting into enemy territory. You pilot a V-22 Osprey plane over the mission map and decide where to drop your pods. For instance if you decide to avoid combat in the early stages and want to complete your objectives as fast as possible you may want to drop your pods in the top part of the map (this is the area where you actually have to complete your objectives). This means you don't carry a lot of ammo (= weight) with you in the early stages and you can run for long periods of time. On the other hand, if you want to engage in combat early you must spread out your supply pods. Note that there's also a maximum to the amount of weight you can carry so it's useless to pick up all the supply pods immediately, you would only waste ammo. The V-22 Osprey flies over the map only once and you don't get to see the map in advance so you'll have to improvise. Be sure not to drop your pods on a structure, a minefield or into a lake or it is lost. Finally you need to jump out yourself at the bottom part of the level.
3. The actual mission. The missions have all kinds of objectives like: photographing an experimental aircraft, freeing hostages, knocking out enemy enemy radar, capturing an enemy officer etc. In some missions you need to keep a low profile; you run from trench to trench using the time you spend in a trench to regain your breath. In other missions you must create a lot of damage by blowing up bunkers & special structures and killing soldiers. After your mission you'll need to go to the pick-up point. You can decide your own route through the level but be sure to be at the pick-up point before the timer reaches zero or the plane leaves without you and you'll be M.I.A. (another ranger can later liberate you by performing a "Free the P.O.W.'s" mission). The missions take place in 3 different settings: the desert, an arctic setting and a temperate setting. In the temperate setting you can hide underwater, in the arctic setting you can lure enemy soldiers onto unstable patches of ice; so the terrain is somewhat interactive. Moreover there are multiple maps for each mission (or they are randomly generated). You don't have to play the missions in a particular order unless you select the campaign mode.

Other noteworthy gameplay elements:

• If you’re wounded (or carry a lot of ammo), you can't run very far before running out of stamina.
• In some missions you can kill an enemy soldier and wear his uniform.
• Use time bombs for delayed destruction.
• You can decide how far you want to throw a grenade by holding down the fire button for varying periods of time.
• You can dodge enemy bullets by crawling through trenches.

I wouldn't call the graphics spectacular, but they do the job. Supposedly the game supports the MCGA graphics mode, but I could only get the EGA mode to work. Airborne Ranger doesn't have Soundblaster support, so I'm glad there isn't any music.The amount of sound effects is minimal but every one of them is functional. For instance, you can stop and listen for footsteps to know whether an enemy soldier is near.

**The Bad**
It is of course unfair to compare this game with recent entries in the stealth genre like Splinter Cell or Thief 2, but when you do this you'll see that the whole stealth element isn't implemented very well in Airborne Ranger. Because of the amount of (infinitely spawning ) soldiers in each level, it's virtually impossible to remain unnoticed. Even when I used my knife, which is of course the weapon that creates the least amount of noise, to kill them it seemed I ran into one every fifteen seconds. I don't think I ever completed a mission in which I killed less than 35 soldiers.

• The campaign mode lacks a decent ending. You just play the twelve available missions one after another without any reward. You do get another promotion but nothing special happens.
• On the two (out of four) difficulty settings the game is impossibly to beat.
• It's rather silly, but a small desert bush can block an incoming LAW rocket.

**The Bottom Line**
Join the U.S. special forces and perform all kinds of missions behind enemy lines. I may not be the first stealth game (that honor probably goes to the original Castle Wolfenstein), but nonetheless Airborne Ranger is one of the pioneers of the genre. Because of it's diversity it's still damn fun to play too, even though it's over fifteen years old.