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Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road review

Game: Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road
Platform: NES
Genre: Scrolling Shooter (Vertical)
Developer: SNK
AKA: Ikari II: Dogosoken (JP)

Reader review by JoeTheDestroyer

June 13, 2011

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

I had thought that with so much ground to expand upon that SNK couldn't possibly make Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road any worse than its predecessor. And there I go with the overly trusting and naïve understanding of the gaming industry... Rather than improving upon the first Ikari's glaring flaws, they exacerbated them. Controls turned stiffer, difficulty got hairier, and expectations went straight to alien hell.

It started out promising enough. Graphics looked, at least back then, more up to date, and there was a life bar in the upper left. A life bar! God, why didn't SNK think of that in the first one? That life bar becomes no more than a cruel joke once you move forward and see how stiff the controls are. As horrendous as Ikari Warriors? No, worse. While your commando wades through invisible waist-deep peanut butter, the aliens and flying vampires surround him and pelt him projectiles. You still can't instantly turn in the opposite direction, and to do so your character has to make a slow semi-circle that all but screams DEPOSIT BULLETS HERE. This especially gets annoying in the second level when you fight swift-moving knights that can one-shot you easily. It doesn't take long before that life bar diminishes to nothing. On your first time playing, this can happen within a minute or so.

Oh well, one life down, no big-

GAME OVER

Oh, what the hell is this? Pit-Fighter?

One life is all you get in Ikari II. There are no legit continues, though SNK still wants you to be a dancing queen. Hit that grand ol' combo, A-B-B-A, before the game over screen and you can boogie back to life and suffer through an entire game of stiff controls and projectiles you couldn't possibly dodge. I have to question: did SNK develop this game with the continue cheat in mind, and therefore make the difficulty tough as nails without any planning or consideration for fairness? Perhaps if the gameplay were better the cheat would be worth the while, but that's not the case.

The only point of interest is in purchasing new power-ups using gory, pulsating hearts that you extract from your enemies as currency. Enjoy them while you can, because they fade the instant you die. Remember how long that takes?

Each level culminates in a dull boss battle that requires you to lob grenades and run away in awkward angles and directions, hoping your grenade actually hits. Half the time you can't tell because the boss's only indication that it's been hit is a nanosecond-long red flash. You practically have to sense that you're doing damage rather than actually notice it. Later bosses move or shoot so quickly that you have to lose a life just to land a single hit. It's here that you realize the harsh reality that this game cannot be beaten without cheating. If this is what SNK intended all along, then why bother trying? The game has now shifted from 'impossible' to 'too easy'.

Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road is how a sequel should never turn out. SNK expanded on a few ideas, but deemed it unnecessary to address its predecessor's flaws. Where the stiff controls and ridiculous difficulty/lack of difficulty were a problem before, they're rampant now. Even if you could stand using a cheat to walk the road to victory, it's questionable whether or not you can stomach playing that long. SNK should have left this one in the arcade.

Rating: 2/10

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