Silver Surfer

The Good
The graphics and sound are both above average with some cool animated cut scenes. The control is responsive with power-ups to increase your firepower. The storyline allows the player to choose the order that they complete the game, and generally shows respect for the comic book source material.

The Bad
Let us not beat around the 8-bit bush. This game is incredibly difficult to the point that it may very well drive people insane or at least to a new level of profanity. The all-powerful, cosmic Silver Surfer dies if he is hit once, by anything, or crashes into the background.

As each level is filled with lots of fast moving enemies, projectiles and background it is safe to say that you will probably die over and over again.

Only the few will probably survive to battle any of the mini-bosses, let alone the comic book super villains awaiting you at the end of each level. Granted, this high level of difficultly is muted by the fact a password exists to make the Silver Surfer totally invincible.
The second complaint is the size of the characters.

It is easy to recognize the Silver Surfer and the small size allows for a more active, fast paced game environment, but if you are lucky enough to make it to any of the super villain bosses, you may find their tiny size and generic use of projectiles and hiding behind barriers to be a far cry from the sort of battles seen in the comics.

Heck, it is anyone’s guess who the final boss is suppose to be and he is a giant purple thing with a gun.


The Bottom Line
Silver Surfer features impressive graphics, sound and a solid storyline. However, it has taken a very powerful super hero and reduced him to a small, cosmic wimp. Only a few die hard comic book fans of fans of insanely difficult shooting games will probably attempt to play the game, even then I suspect most people will use the passwords.