Carrier Air Wing (Arcade) review "Somehow both delightful and forgettable"

As I play Carrier Air Wing, I can't help feeling Capcom was merely ticking boxes on a list of contemporary standards when developing it. In a lot of ways, it's your run-of-the-mill plane-based shmup with few frills or standout features. Hell, even both of its monikers underwhelm. The aforementioned US title sounds like a fictional arcade game you'd see in the background of a TV show, and its Japanese name, U.S. Navy, screams "Atari 2600 launch title." It's as if Capcom just wanted to spit out another U.N. Squadron-style shooter, resulting in a piece that's easily forgotten between stellar sci-fi, semi-realistic, and fantasy scrollers.

And yet, the game somehow makes do with its imaginative limitations. Yeah, this is the 4000th affair where you, a lone ace pilot, take on an entire fictional Middle Eastern army--a country called "Rabu"--and manage to single-handedly (or double-handedly, if a friend joins in) plow through massive aircrafts, titanic submarines, and even a country-destroying satellite on its way into orbit. While those examples aren't exactly cutting edge creativity, they present a great foil to the conventional weaponry you face on your way to those confrontations. Massive plane encounters crop up in tons of scrolling shooters, but their here presence is a welcome change of pace after gunning down legions of vanilla helicopters.

Unfortunately, your initial takeoff does little to pique your interest. You jet to a coastal city and blast bogeys out of the sky that fly at you in ridiculous formations. Get used to this, because your opponents execute similar maneuvers throughout the campaign. Eventually, beefier aeros comes your way, perishing with only a little added effort. And if you manage to snag a power-up and bolster your offensive capabilities, as you would in just about every game within this genre, then even the mightier foes fall without much fuss. You might be inclined to launch the special weapon your purchased at the beginning of the level, which releases a couple of missiles that first act as option blasters for a few seconds before converting into flying explosives. Obviously, you'll want to save those goodies for the boss: an even bigger plane.

By this point, you're either going to walk away after your game ends or you're going to roll another quarter into the slot and give this beast an additional chance. Personally, I recommend the latter because things pick up with level two, where the city in the background now becomes the environment itself. You kick this one off breezing along a freeway and bumping off tanks and choppers. Before long, you run afoul of destroyed pieces of overpasses that stymie you, creating branching pathways. Do you take the highroad and battle the copters or the low alley and deal with the vehicles? Level two takes things a bit farther once skyscrapers show up, blocking your flight path and leaving you no recourse except to blast your way through them. After you've made your share of holes, you cross paths with a kaiju-sized, crawling mech for a level boss.

As you can tell, you not only have those menaces to deal with, but the closed spaces as well. Never fear because dinging your ride on the highway doesn't automatically kill you. In fact, any time you sustain a blow, you simply lose fuel. Of course, once you're out of gas, your game ends. The good news you restart where you fell once you drop another coin.

From the second boss encounter, you advance to another stage that's serene, and yet forgettable and rife with standard dogfights. You battle amid lush scenery with rolling mountains in the far background, eventually traveling back to an open sea that's bereft of any breathtaking views. Once again, you engage a boss that might as well have been lifted from an early 194X entry.

That's the thing with this game. You encounter segments that don't leave much of an impression, and only serve to make the wilder sections feel that much more exciting. However, even that realization doesn't diminish the notion that roughly half of Carrier's campaign could have been pilfered from any military shooter. But then you have the other half of the game, which smacks of the intense content companies like SNK, Konami, Hudson Soft, and Irem were putting out.

For instance, one stage sees you descending a mountainside and dodging perilous cliffs, only to force your way into one of Rabu's compounds. That outing precedes a whole level of plain clouds and the same oceanic backdrops we've seen prior, albeit this time littered with icebergs. From there, it's onto a polar sea littered with monstrous chunks of ice inside frozen caves that create more claustrophobia, requiring you to shatter them with your gun before forging onward.

At very least the difficulty rating picks up big time by stage four, where you must dodge quickly, memorize patterns, and hold out for refueling power-ups. The game never gets to bullet-hell levels of intensity, but still pelts you with enemies flying in at awkward angles while firing projectiles at peculiar speeds or missiles in trios with slim spaces between them. Arguably the most aggravating thing you'll face comes in the form of tanks that launch airborne mines when destroyed, forcing you to carefully weave around the floating bombs while also avoiding oncoming crafts and bullets.

It's hilarious because any time I play this game, I legitimately enjoy myself. Call me a simpleton, but I love the explosions and death-defying projectile dodging. However, the instant I run out of quarters and walk away, I carry on with my life and don't think, "Man, I wish I had just one more credit." I don't know if anyone identifies with this phenomenon, but Carrier only entertains when you're actively playing it and watching it unravel before your eyes. The instant you turn away from the cabinet, it reverts back into the umpteenth scrolling shooter with basic planes, hardly begging for loose pocket change.

By now, you're probably arguing that I've left off whole details about the kinds of upgrades or secondary weaponry and shields you purchase between levels. Honestly, Carrier does so little with these concepts that they didn't leave an impression on me, like about half of the material presented here. As I've stated, Carrier Air Wing is an anomaly. It's terrific, albeit somewhat unimaginative, when you're playing it. However, it's just another basic product in a genre chock full of killer games that easily outmaneuver this one, and it quickly becomes forgotten.

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (August 12, 2022) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.