Arrow Flash Longplay (Sega Genesis)Mega Drive

Publisher: Renovation Products
Year of Release: 1990

Game Review & Impressions
---------------------------------------------------
Not a shoot 'em up I'd heard of before, Arrow Flash isn't going to win any awards for innovation. It's a relatively by-the-numbers horizontal shooter with the usually assortment of upgrades, end-of-level bosses and everything else common to the genre.

The game does try and mix things up by allowing the player to transform between fighter and mech-suit mode. The fighter has a narrower cone of fire and has a blastwave as a special weapon, whereas the mech has a wider angle of fire and can initiate what I fiess is the titular "Arrow Flash", turning itself into a glowing death hulk that can kill enemies on contact.

The reality is that these two modes don't really offer a huge variety in terms of gameplay. I didn't find there was much need to use the special abilities all that often, with the regular weapons being powerful enough in most cases. What we're left with is a game with some nice parallax scrolling and cool demoscene-style tricks, but fairly mundane gameplay.