Retro game review: Elevator Action (Nintendo Entertainment System)

retro-room (63)in #gaming • 7 years ago (edited)

The early years of the NES brought us many arcade ports. They were titles that already had exposure and were easily ported to the NES. Arcade hits were an easy sell, with titles like Gauntlet, Millipede, Defender II, Joust and Burgertime all hitting the popular Nintendo home console. Among these arcade ports is Taito’s Elevator Action, a game with its roots planted deep in its arcade origins. How does this home port of Elevator Action hold up?

In Elevator Action, you play as a spy who must infiltrate a skyscraper and steal documents from the corrupt government (I think, I wasn’t paying much attention to the story.) You start on the top floor of the building and descend from the top down to the street level while finding all of the red doors, which is where the secret documents are being kept.

Your primary method of descending through this building is riding the elevators down, and you can can control the up or down movement of the elevators when you’re riding in one. You can also hop onto the roof of an elevator, but at that point you’re at the mercy of whatever direction its headed. In addition, some floors have escalators that provide a different or alternative method of going down to the next floor.

As soon as you hit the floor, enemy agents will try to stop you at every turn. They come out of doors scattered around each floor of the building and are equipped with guns and fire on sight. Thankfully, you’re also equipped with a fast-firing gun of your own. In addition, you can take down an agent by jumping into their head. However, the most satisfying method of dispatching them is crushing them below the elevator if they walk below it, or smashing them into the ceiling if they’ve climbed onto the top of the elevator. The last way to take out these agents is by shooting the light fixtures and dropping them on their heads (which knocks out the lights for about 5 seconds and turns the screen mostly black.)

Once you reach the bottom of the building, you escape in your rad hatchback and move onto the next level. However, if you missed one of the red doors, you’re sent back up to the floor where you missed the file. This is accompanied by a digital scraping noise that sounds like the sound board of your NES was dragged over a cheese grater. So don’t miss any red doors!

The game controls pretty poorly, from requiring you to press up to get out of a crouch to having to not only stand in the exact right spot and be facing the right direction to enter red doors or hop on an escalator. These control problems will get you killed when agents are hot on your tail.

In the first stage, the enemy agents are fairly passive and don’t really chase you that much. By the second level, you have to be on your toes to avoid getting caught. But by the third stage, they become relentless killing machines. They’ll fire on you as you come down the elevator, wait for you to exit red doors and otherwise become your worst nightmare. After the first two levels presented a fun challenge, I couldn’t beat the third stage even using save states on my Retron 5. I went through at least 20 lives trying to pass through three particularly nasty floors. At this point, the game went from fun to the bane of my existence. How did the game become this unfair so quickly? After I lost countless agents by constantly reloading this one section, I gave up, walked away and ripped the NES game out of my console. I haven’t been this frustrated by a game in years.

Elevator Action presents the most bare-bones graphics and sounds the NES could skate by on. Everything is represented clearly, but there is no detail on anything, no shading and it features a garish and boring color palette. This could nearly pass for a high-end Atari 2600 game. Sprites are extremely basic and animation is made up of no more than two frames.

Sound is equally disappointing. The gunshot is the only satisfying sound effect, as everything else is basic bloops and bleeps. There’s a single music track that plays throughout the entire game, which loops after about 15 seconds. What’s worse is that it utilizes a single instrument. It sounds like it was composed in 15 minutes.

I really wanted to like Elevator Action, but there are just way too many problems with it. The gameplay shifts from fun to frustrating within minutes and it controls, looks and sounds terrible. If you really want to get your fix of Elevator Action, I’d advise seeking out the arcade original (which is available on the Taito Legends collection on the Playstation 2). While relatively cheap, I would be reluctant to suggest this game to anyone other than NES completionists.