I’ve never owned an Amiga, but I am obsessed With Enemy: Storm of Violence, an Amiga game developed by Switzerland and released in 1997. Buckle up this is a ride
My partner and I have a ritual where we watch Twitch on the weekends before bed. My partner is an edgy old man (even though he’s only 34 years old) and has no desire to watch popular streamers or popular games. hell just Check out Streamer on the Retro Channel – the Twitch channel dedicated to games as old as we are. That’s where we found Macaw45, an Australian streamer with a penchant for the darkest of all arcane games. One weekend we saw Macaw45 play an ancient looking game in which a lone security guard armed only with a simple pistol mowed down an army of aliens and brought his human allies to safety. The game was Enemy: Storm of Violenceand every weekend for the past month my partner and I have religiously seen Macaw45 find its way through this game, and it was rivet damn it
I’ll do my best to explain Enemy: Storm of Violence and i will fail. Mere words cannot fully convey the batshit’s clout, but I’ll try anyway.
Enemy: Storm of Violence is an action puzzle game in which you play a handful of characters trapped on three giant alien ships. There are 34 time-limited levels, each with its own goal aimed at surviving and outsmarting your alien opponents. Sometimes you need to guide civilians from one part of the ship to another and manage them so that they don’t die from booby traps or alien enemies. There are also times when your goal is to get a task done, e.g. B. defending a room, negotiating with the aliens or destroying their eggs. Other times, you get a damn big gun, 1000 enemies, and the simple imperative to survive.
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The different configurations of time and resources make each level a puzzle to be solved, and therein lies the subtle genius of the enemy. Watching Macaw try and error as he moved through her enemy a fascinating watch. The game gives broad clues about what to do before each mission, but beyond that, Macaw was on his own. Watching his reactions as he felt his way through the puzzles and story was as entertaining as the action that played out on the screen.
During the egg mission, there were situations where Ara used all of his bullets to shoot the eggs and then had nothing left to kill the aliens and vice versa since you were given so little ammunition. To get through, Macaw had to figure out how each bullet counted. That meant shooting eggs from the ceiling to make them fall and crushing eggs on the floor, or dropping a grenade through a grate on the floor to break eggs he couldn’t reach.
During the last mission, Macaw – trapped on the last remaining ship – had to figure out how to get past a room full of aliens that could blow him and his alien allies to pieces at any time. By trial and error, Macaw found that he had to rid one of his more powerful weapons of its ammunition and only had one pistol left. He then had to walk through subsequent rooms full of enemies with their weapons pointed at him until he came to the alien queen who he then had to quickly shoot, kill and pick up the scepter that dropped them all before the aliens dropped him and Fix had shot to death.
Other missions weren’t that complex. During the eponymous “Storm of Violence” level, Macaw and his 400 allies fought their way through an attack by 929 enemies before the timer ran out. The weird number of enemies filling the screen only to leave bloody stains on the wall and decaying bodies on the floor was damn entertaining.
The charm of the enemy also lies in his story. There are no dialogues or cutscenes, so the story is only delivered through long scribbled text that reads like a pulp novel from the ‘.50s.
The text is littered with awkward phrasing and spelling mistakes, but the mistakes only add to this enemyThe Charme. What started out as a simple “stranded scientist defending himself against bloodthirsty aliens” took so many wild turns. As the game progresses, you’ll team up with a number of alien NPCs by names like Bumbum (so named after the twin pistols he wields) and Bigboss. You commit some war crimes by destroying the alien eggs. One of the three ships is destroyed. The other is missing along with all of his human crew. Pirates show up somehow. One of your alien allies tragically dies off-screen (RIP Foxy). At the end of the game, the last human survivor has become the extraterrestrial queen through a comedy of imperfect mistakes.
Macaw finished the game last night and I’m so glad I saw his final moments. The final handful of missions – from the 300 Spartans in the final battle against an army of 900 aliens to the absolute madmen Chronicles of Riddick The end of the “You keep what you kill” style – it was so great to see it live that I don’t regret giving up the ritual of watching Macaw’s streams with my partner to watch for myself. I excitedly told him the highlights, but he’s stunned that he missed it. (Our schedules during the week are so different that we only watch streams together on weekends.) He won’t be confused for long, Enemy: Storm of Violence has a sequel, and Macaw’s said he plans to play it in the future. I can not wait any longer
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