Heavy Fire: Afghanistan

My instinct whenever an on-rails shooter shows up in the review queue is to check whether it plays better with a light gun. Heavy Fire: Afghanistan is the kind of game that answers that question immediately: yes, it was built for one, and the PC is not where it belongs. Teyon's budget arcade series started on WiiWare, and this entry landed on Steam in August 2014 feeling like a sloppy port from the start. The mouse works as a cursor replacement for the missing light gun, but there is nothing satisfying about dragging a crosshair over pop-up enemies on a monitor when the whole design assumes you are physically pointing a peripheral at a screen. The 24 missions run through a mix of on-foot sections, tank sequences, helicopter strafing runs, and Humvee gun positions. Variety is there on paper. In practice, the moment-to-moment loop is identical across all of them: enemies appear, red exclamation marks telegraph exactly who is about to shoot you, you click on them, repeat. There is a cover system that lets you duck behind objects, but the difficulty sits so low that leaning on it rarely matters. Weapons range from a starting pistol up to an M-249 machine gun unlocked through the upgrade tree, and over 60 awards and rank progressions give completionists something to chase. The upgrade system resets freely, which is a small practical mercy, but the weapon pool is thin and most choices become irrelevant once you realize one accurate burst clears nearly every encounter. Time-to-kill is essentially zero, which removes all tension. The audio is rough in a way that shooter players will feel immediately. Your weapons sound flat and muted, enemy fire sounds like it is coming from another room, and the voice acting is delivered with such disinterest that it slides from annoying into accidentally funny within the first briefing screen. The writing clearly went through a difficult translation pass and the mission-intro walls of text are read aloud verbatim by someone who sounds like they would rather be anywhere else. Visually, the game looks like an early PS3 title, which makes sense since that is essentially what it is. The one situation where this game stops being a chore is four-player local co-op. Cram four people around one machine, set up four input devices, and the chaos of everyone shooting at the same enemies becomes a dumb, fun ten minutes. That window closes fast. Steam shows a mixed reception across a modest review count, and the complaints are consistent: too easy, too short, too thin on weapons and variety. There is no online multiplayer, so the co-op value only applies if you have people physically present. Control configuration on PC has reported quirks with gamepad detection that can interfere with the multi-player setup, which is the one thing the game actually has going for it. Fred, Scout Team