Rescue Raiders: Not won!

Verdun was my Waterloo.

 

Well, I tried. I liberated the strangely identical-looking cities of Cherbourg, Caen, Saint-Lô, Orléans, and even Paris, but Verdun just wore my patience out. The farther I got, the more it became clear to me that you don't beat Rescue Raiders' missions with skill or strategy - you out-endure them.

The game locked up here and this wasn't the first time. I quit.

 

This isn't to say that Rescue Raiders' gameplay doesn't evolve at all. As you progress through the campaign, you get some upgraded weaponry; tanks gain a 105mm cannon, your bombs get incendiary payloads, and your machinegun gets replaced with an unguided missile launcher which can utterly devastate ground forces and even engage the enemy helicopter at short range.

But these upgrades all serve to make you even more dependent on your chopper to accomplish anything. Upgrades go both ways - your tanks get cannons, but their tanks get cannons, and the chopper becomes your only reliable armor killer; and I once watched a single enemy tank rip through all six of mine. The enemy chopper likewise starts using homing missiles against you and decimates your armies with upgraded ground weapons. It even gets better at dodging your anti-aircraft missiles.

Speaking of which, the enemy starts using anti-aircraft vehicles themselves by the third mission, so you'd better start learning to dodge them yourself.

And to top it off, forget about using tanks to take out AA guns; now they tend to be guarded by anti-tank guns. It's not uncommon to find a triple-whammy of AA guns, AT guns, and a heavy bunker gathered together in one horrible turtle cluster. Nothing can get close to that but you, and you may need to sacrifice a chopper or two in your bombing runs.

But once you level them, they make great air cover after your engineers repair and convert them.

On the bright side, money becomes less of an issue. With your armies of such limited use, you can reserve your cash for replacement choppers - each one costs $20M which you earn in about five minutes - and with so much time spent flying back and forth across the map, by the time you even need armies you probably have enough to buy whatever materiel you need. And if you need more cash, no problem - just hang back near the helipad for awhile and let the enemy come to your side of the battlefield, where you can waste them under the cover of your AA and SAMs and rearm at will. I never came close to running out of lives myself; excess cash just got dumped into so many extra lives that the screen couldn't even display them all.

You do need armies; first to escort engineers to AA guns and bunkers, because you definitely want to take advantage of fortifications as much as possible. AA guns in particular are one of the few reliable defenses you have against the enemy chopper; salvage whenever possible, and protect the hell out of them.

Once you break through to the enemy base, you'll need to build a big army to assault it, and this is where things get real frustrating. It was bad enough on the first mission, and with an upgraded enemy chopper, it only gets worse. Without demolition trucks, the assault is doomed, but there are so many ways I've lost them, forcing me to start it all over again. I've had my anti-aircraft vehicles self-destruct after firing and destroy my demolition trucks with shrapnel. I've had the enemy chopper dodge the wall of missiles and take out the demolition trucks, or the tanks guarding them. I've seen the helicopter explode and the pilot parachute out, landing right on top of the demolition trucks, inexplicably destroying them.

I've even blown up the demo trucks with a combination of crossfire and my own shrapnel after a mutually deadly dogfight intended to protect them.

 

But more than anything else, I've flown away from the front to rearm, and returned to find that the demo trucks just aren't there any more; the low-res radar being woefully inadequate to illustrate what happened.

Then when the game froze on mission 6, I gave up.

There is one video series on Youtube showing a successful playthrough, and even lovelier things awaited in the final two missions; stealth choppers in Brussels, and no radar at all in Antwerp. Thanks, but I'll just watch the ending there!

GAB rating: Average. Rescue Raiders promises "the intellectual challenge of a strategy game," but I don't see it. As an arcade game, this can't avoid comparisons to Choplifter, which looks, controls, and plays much better, even if the earlier game doesn't play fair all the time either. As a strategy game, well, there aren't many strategies available to use, and to win missions I found myself just trying the same thing over and over again with minimal variation until it eventually worked. It's not a great look that the easiest mission felt like it afforded the most strategic breadth! Rescue Raiders may be an important game historically, which is why I played it, but I can see why it didn't take the world by storm.