Review: Raptor: Call of the Shadows (1994)

After you complete a sector's missions, you can do them all over again. This time the difficulty will be increased, so be prepared to deal with a more dangerous enemy than before. Note that if you play through a sector at the lowest difficulty, you'll be forced to leave the sector before you actually reach the end. When this happens, you'll lose your money and equipment (explained in game as the price for "training expenses") and need to start over from scratch.

There are a handful of weapons that are always equipped and fire whenever you press the fire button, but there are also miniature nuclear bombs and selectable secondary weapons. These secondary weapons allow for some customized load outs, as nearly all of them feature some unique mechanics beyond just blowing up what's in front of you. Some will attack only ground targets, others only airborne targets, and one will even automatically target something nearby.

The first location in the game is Bravo Sector, which appears to be a military or industrial center in a rocky, mountainous region. Next are the more heavily defended jungles and cities of Tango Sector, and finally there's the various planets in the Outer Regions. Each sector is harder than the previous one, so I would suggest advancing in this order.

You can have quite a few different pilots registered. Each pilot represents a new game, and thus you can have multiple players use the same installation. Additionally, each profile gets a name, callsign and one of four portraits, making them easily to tell apart.

A downside to playing this on Steam is that the Steam launcher is configured to go straight into the game itself. You'll need to launch Dosbox manually, mount the correct folder as your virtual C drive, and run setup.exe in order to change the game's settings.

Also, just to make things difficult, this utility doesn't save your changes on exit. Instead, you'll need to make sure that you, be sure to choose the option to save your changes before you exit it. Lastly, verifying the Steam cache will reset these settings, which is kind of annoying.

You can play through Raptor in roughly two hours. This was a long game back in the day, but it's nothing compared to the epics that are produced now.

While it's a good idea to install every weapon that is always equipped, you're limited to using only one of your secondary weapons at a time. In theory this sounds like you'll be able to change your weapons to reflect the current situation, but in reality you're not going to need to bother. Very few of the secondary weapons are worth purchasing; it's more practical to just focus on increasing your damage output rather than thinking about dealing with special cases.

Between every level, you're presented with a map of your hangar. This map allows you to access the store, leave for the mission, exit the game or save. Being an old game, this is also the only time you can save the game, and you'll need to do this yourself. Autosave didn't become a standard feature until later on, and a lot of us take it for granted, so be mindful about saving often.

All of the violence in this title boils down to somebody blowing up something else. You're always blowing up enemy aircraft, buildings on the ground or anti-aircraft artillery. Alternatively, you're getting blown up by something else. Still, it's very tame since most of the action is about explosions.

One of the quirks about this game is that you rarely actually see the people involved. Enemy vehicles have what look like cockpits, but since you can't see inside them it can easily give you an impression that you're fighting an army of robot drones. Unfortunately, this is disproved when you pay closer attention. There are two obviously human characters in the game: You and the shopkeeper. You know your own character is human since you select their profile picture at the start of the game and if you get shot down during a mission, you're shown a cutscene of your plane crashing. During this cutscene, the pilot is briefly visible. Another reminder is that when you visit the store, the owner's face appears on the terminal for a moment and you can see your own character's profile on the left.

While that covers the majority of the game's depictions of people, there are also a few missions in Tango Sector where people are visible. When you blow up certain cars, a human body will be visible in the rubble, implying that there was someone inside the car when you destroyed it. There is also a sunbather on one of the buildings you can destroy.

Oddly, this is played with in another level where the battle takes place over various farms. None of the humans working there can be harmed by anything you have (including your nuclear bombs).