Game:

Terminal Velocity (1995)

Duration: 9:08

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Terminal Velocity is an arcade flight combat game made by Terminal Reality and published by 3D Realms. It was released in 1995.

I'm not sure if I am qualified to do a review for these kinda games because I usually don't play them but I'm sure that Terminal Velocity doesn't really stand out among the games of it's kind and I could probably say something like "There is almost nothing in the game that hasn't been done better by others in that genre" But you can correct me If I am wrong.

Actually I like to think of TV as more of a "3D Shoot 'em Up", kinda like Raptor or Tyrian just that you see it all from a first person perspective. Sadly it neither has the diversity nor the customisation of either of those but that's exactly what may could have made this game great I guess. The game overall felt just a bit rushed to me.

In general your missions are always the same or atleast very similar, just fly around and destroy some targets (which are mostly buildings somewhere on the map) and get your ship to the exit point afterwards.

You can find a selection of plasma, laser and missile weapons and most of them can be upgraded by picking them up more than once. Some weapons have infinite ammo in their default state but use up ammo as soon as they are upgraded to a dual or quad shot version. After the ammo is depleted they are downgraded and have infinite ammo again which basically means you can shoot as much as you want but maybe you should keep the stronger weapons for tougher targets.

You can also find Afterburner power ups which basically just "fuel up" your already existing Afterburner. You can activate that at any time and it's purpose is to get you faster from one point to another. The maps can be pretty big sometimes so it's better not to use it constantly.

One of the cooler features was that you can fly into underground tunnels at any time where you needed to be careful and slow because it can be difficult to maneuver in those tight corridors. But there aren't just tunnels, often you fly through a whole giant underground complex filled with enemies,buildings, turrets and even some sort of bosses. It kinda gave you that "Star Wars Deathstar feeling" sometimes

Another good thing in the game is that the player never gets lost. You have a "compass" in the upper right corner of the screen which always shows in the direction of your next target. You can also activate some sort of fullscreen radar which will show you a wide range of enemies and buildings that are within a certain radius around you.

Also because there is no predefined path in a game like this you can do the missions any way you wanted. I'm not sure if the enemies respawn endlessly but bascially if you enjoy flying around you could destroy everything you want on the map for as long as you want. Or if you just want to complete the mission you can follow your "compass" and just jump from one target to the next with your afterburner.

The graphics are probably the thing that stands out the most for a game from that era but you shouldn't judge that by my video because I used VGA mode instead of SVGA for performance reasons while the video was captured and the demo version had only low resolution textures so it can actually look better than what you see here ;)

All in all I would say Terminal Velocity is not a bad game but it is not great either. It is a game you would probably play for 15-20 minutes and then quit to do something else. Or when you are bored while the commercials run when watching Television. Actually if the controls are any useful on a Tablet I guess it could also make a good mobile game :P

I'm not aware of a multiplayer feature in this game but you can correct me if that's not true.

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