- Operation Thunderbolt
- Operation Hanoi
- Operation Wolf
- Operation Wolf 3
Arcade Flyer
Operation Wolf 3 barely feels like an Operation Wolf game. Instead of taking place in a jungle, it takes place in an urban setting. The visuals are now all digitized live action images, similar to Konami’s Lethal Enforcers from two years prior. Commandos Roy Adams and Hardy Jones from the last two games are gone, replaced with the sleek and snazzy agents Hornet and Queen Bee. Rather than submachine guns, you wield large pistols, though they’re still cabinet mounted a la Operation Thunderbolt. There’s no need to worry about ammo supplies, because it’ll automatically refill when you stop firing.
One big reason for the shift is that this entry was not developed by Taito, but rather outsourced to East Technology, the same company that made the dreadful arcade version of Double Dragon 3. Operation Wolf 3 is not nearly as bad as that game, but it still feels like it’s playing follow-the-leader by copying a popular title like Lethal Enforcers, rather than innovating, or at least leaning into its established setting.
What it does have is cheese, and lots of it. Broken English is everywhere, with phrases “steal into the factory”, “pass a expressway” and “command to gun metal army”. The backstory amounts to a single sentence among the image of a skull, reading “A few years after huge force of terrorists ‘Skull’ occupied some island they are armed with nuclear weapon.” The digitized screams are amusing, with one in particular clearly being taken from the 1985 film Commando. The first few stages take place in a factory and then on a highway as you shoot down armored cars, tanks, and helicopters, venture through an urban wasteland, then infiltrate the nebulously named “Tower of Them” for the final encounters. The boss of this stage is a large missile-firing robots; destroy this and it will reveal a mechanical brain, complete with spinal cord, which continues to attack. In the final stage, you need to shoot down a nuclear missile, whittling down its health before the time limit expires and it hits its target. One might expect better missile defense systems than one or two special agents pounding it with hundreds of bullets, but perhaps that’s less thrilling.
Compared to its predecessors, Operation Wolf 3 didn’t get as widely distributed, and there were never any console ports, leaving it as an obscure entry in the series.
