After Burner Climax - Arcade (2006)
Similar to Sky Target, there are a couple of branching paths through the game - you fly fifteen stages over the course of the game, but there are over twenty in total. Also similar to Sky Target, you now have a damage meter, so you can take a few hits before crash landing. The titular addition is the "Climax" mode, where you temporarily slow down time Matrix-style by jamming the throttle into the highest setting, allowing you to target whole slews of enemies at once with a barrage of missiles. On the off chance that you find a linked cabinet (if you can find a single one at all), you can also fly co-op with a friend. Most of the music is fast paced rock, and while it's appropriately cheesy and fairly decent, none of it is nearly as memorable as the old songs.
It's a fantastic, gorgeous game, one that's faithful to its roots while adding a brand new gloss of paint, but it still feels like something is missing. After Burner Climax doesn't offer any real depth beyond flying, shooting, and dodging. There are some scoring mechanics for comboing enemy destruction, but it doesn't really add anything. Of course, it's ridiculous to bash an arcade game for being an arcade game - it's basically a flashy amusement park ride, with cabinets that tilt back and forth just like some of the older games, although they don't go 360 degrees like R360 G-LOC cabinets did. And for those reasons, it's damn impressive. But it feels like this shallowness is what doomed this games to remain solely in the arcades, because it would probably lack any real staying appeal to justify a home port.
MP3s
After Burner Climax
After Burner Climax
After Burner Climax
After Burner Climax
After Burner: Black Falcon - Playstation Portable (2007)
In addition to the standard Vulcan cannons and heat seeking missiles, you also have an air-to-ground cannon to destroy land based targets. If you destroy multiple enemies simultaneously, you'll get a combo bonus, which spawns a bonus crate containing extra life or ammo replenishments. You also execute a 360 roll by pressing the Triangle button, which is practically required to dodge projectiles. It takes some getting used too, because it's hard to see incoming missiles with all of the action going on, and trying to dodge bullets is unnecessarily difficult. Although you have a damage meter and multiple lives per stage, it's easy to burn through all of that if you're not paying attention. If it becomes too frustrating, you can always set the game to Easy, because you can take plenty of hits, offsetting the somewhat unfair difficulty inherent in After Burner games.
There are usually multiple objectives in each stage, which involve killing a certain number of enemies or completing the missions quickly. Higher scores will give you more cash to buy new aircraft and upgrade your weapons. There are tons of licensed craft from Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and unlike the extra ships in the Sega Ages After Burner, there are huge differences in their power, speed and handling. The mission structure and customization add greatly to the replay value, and allows for convenient quick play, since the missions are pretty short. Unfortunately, the landscapes usually repeat at least twice over the course of the level - some kind of variety would've been nice. There's also a completely unnecessary storyline, including three different playable pilots with no real differences outside of the portrait before each mission. Still, the package is pretty nice overall, considering it's taken an inherently shallow game and given it some lasting value.
After Burner: Black Falcon
After Burner: Black Falcon
After Burner: Black Falcon
Links
After Burner Climax Official Site Tons of pictures.
After Burner Climax
Arcade Flyer
Soundtrack Cover
After Burner Climax
After veering off target with the mediocre Sky Target and the "not even technically related" Sega Strike Fighter, Sega resurrected the After Burner name in 2006 using its Lindbergh hardware, also used in Virtua Fighter 5 and House of the Dead 4. The Lindbergh allows for high def 3D graphics, and the results in After Burner Climax are astounding. The sense of speed lost in many of the previous games has returned, although it makes it hard to appreciate all of the gorgeous landscapes you'll be flying over. In addition to the standard blue oceans and mountainous canyons, you get to fight over volcanos, over cities, and even inside of a military base. The three jets - the F-14D Super Tomcat, F-15E Strike Eagle, and F/A18 Super Hornet - are all officially licensed from Boeing.
The Lure of the Sky
Clouds of Twilight
American Cover
After Burner: Black Falcon
After Burner: Black Falcon
This PSP title is often mistaken for a port of After Burner Climax, but it's actually a completely different game developed by Planet Moon Studios, previously known for goofy shooters like Giants: Citizens Kabuto and Armed and Dangerous. It's also technically the first After Burner title specifically developed for a home audience. Instead of a twenty-stage marathon, After Burner Black Falcon is broken down in a huge number of short missions lasting roughly five minutes each, where the goal is simply to get to the end while destroying as much stuff as possibly along the way. The graphics aren't particularly special, but they move fast, and there's plenty of variety. Fortunately, the gameplay feels just about spot on. The music is all supplied by American rock group Trans Am, most of which isn't too bad, but like Climax, lacks the appeal of the old music.
Like many arcade games of the era, After Burner never quite translated well to the home consoles, at least compared to other Sega games. Still, their impressive graphical tricks make them enjoyable games even decades later. Also worth checking out is the doujin game Master Burner, a clone featuring cutesy characters from the Touhou games.
Insomnia.ac Detailed review of After Burner Climax.
After Burner Station Never finished, but a good start for a fansite.
Sega 16 - After Burner 3 Review of this sorry game.
Wikipedia - After Burner 2 Details some of the changes between the first and second games.
