Heavy Barrel (1987)

Ah, after completing a long stretch of a game I wanted to kick back with something on a Saturday I knew I'd be able to complete... Heavy Barrel was a fantastic pick to scratch that top down shooty-shooty itch and wipe a title off my backlog to boot (how did i not complete this I wonder)

Overall this game isn't too hard, i managed to get to the second to last level on all three legit attempts before resorting to Emulation trix to finish the job. Heavy barrel has the look and feel of so many other games, with the chief main gimmick, of building a big fucking gun!

The trouble with Heavy Barrel is the way you go about building that big fucking gun and how the power up and upgrade system works. There are random locked crates scattered about which you unlock with keys. You collect keys by killing the Bad Guys in Red Jumpsuits(tm) Sounds easy enough, but the trouble is you have no way of knowing what is in a chest, and many of the chests dont seem to actualy contain anything.

When you do get weapon upgrades tho, they are pretty nice. For the most part you can play this game without weapon upgrades, but having a wide arc of fire flamer or spread shot pretty much makes this game a lot easier. You also get upgrades for your grenades.

And there are also the parts for the heavy barrel super weapon, which is fantastic. The trouble is you have a short timer (its about 60 seconds) in which you can use it and after that you have to build it back from scratch! There is no way to save it and use it when you need it most, so sometimes, it's not even that helpful when you fully assemble it and use it!

A bit more music would be nice, there aren't too many tracks but it sounds nice and looks nice, Plays fairly smooth, isn't too hard.

So that's heavy barrel... a fairly generic top down shooter with a gimmick that is a mixed bag, but if you like top down shooters it's easy to forgive the flaws of heavy barrel, its just another fun 2 player co-op shooting game