Sopwith (1984)

Name:Sopwith
Number:185
Year:1984
Publisher:BMB Compuscience
Developer:BMB Compuscience
Genre:Side-Scroller
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour 10 minutes
Won:No (72W/61L)

BMB Compuscience was a primarily business related company making products for a primarily business related computer, the IBM computer. Seemingly their only released game was this, a WWI-inspired MP game with a single player practice mode. Sopwith continues the tradition of exclusive DOS games of this era either being absolute dogs or surprisingly interesting games with the latter.

There are three modes, MP, which I can't play, SP and SP with computer opponent, AKA enemy planes. Both SP modes are the same map, a valley with many targets to blow up, either by shooting them, bombing them, or surprisingly enough, crashing into them. Feel the power of British steel! Muahaha! As you can tell by that statement, this game isn't going for realism.

Each time you start the game, you start at the center of the map, at your home base, cyan to your targets purple. You can return here by pressing H, the computer will automatically land. I'm not sure if you can manually land, my attempts at testing it always end in failure. This is important because ammo is limited. To take off, you turn up, which is always / when you start, , turns down and . flips the plane. That's going to be important, because there are minor bits of realism where that's important to handle.

Once you're off the ground, things are fairly simple, albeit confusing thanks to the obnoxious distance between controls. X and \ control speed, but even at the lowest speed you can climb straight up...just don't hit the ceiling. It works fairly well as presented, just try not to press two buttons at once, because it's still 1984.

Down below you get a GUI, including a map of the game area, and four bars indicating your ammos, fuel and lives.

Eventually, you'll want to destroy some of these purple buildings. Space shoots, while B drops a bomb. The gun doesn't have great range and you have a very limited number of bombs. Also, don't drop a bomb while you're upside down. It will land on you. I say this, and trying to hit things is very effective. If you don't hit a building, congrats, now there's a hole in the ground. Learning how to properly lead the bomb is pretty neat, and aiming your shots to hit a building is too.

Most of the targets are fairly simple shooting, you could easily take them out given enough time. No, the big problem children here are the buildings at the edges of the valleys. One on the very top of the edge, requiring some needle threading. These are probably the ones you'll want to take out first, you can't bomb them, and if you lose a live early on it's not that big a deal.

Eventually, you either run out of lives or you win, with a nice little animation of your plane flying off into the sunset. Either way it's straight back to the DOS prompt. That's basically Sopwith these days, a bit difficult to figure out, but simple and fun once you do. Let's get to the rating.

Okay, you already know where this is going. The enemy plane mode. This is where things go from a fun little novelty to insanity. Up until now, the only real enemy has been your ability to not hit the ground/sky and having four lives. Now, all of that is gone.

The AI plane is much like yours, though the AI sticks to just shooting. If you let it, it's very good at that. Hitting it, is not very easy, but I generally had a pretty good record of taking them out. There's a curious blend of AI perfection along with computer stupidity. They'll just as soon gun you down with absolute precision as crash into the ground.

This is half annoying and half hilarious, because more often than either one of us got shot down, we crashed into each other. Each time it happened was another new glorious explosion. Even better whenever two enemy planes were in the air at once, that was truly special.

But it was annoying as well. Shoot one down, and another one pops up. Enter a different section of the map? Well, now there are two, maybe three planes at once. Some pretty spectacular crashing going on, but avoiding becoming a statistic yourself is just painful.
No matter what I tried, I just couldn't seem to get past them. I could shoot them down, maybe even more of them down than I lost, but I never could take both them down and enough damage to the buildings to stop whatever was causing them to spawn. They just never ran out, and unlike them eventually my desire to win did.

Weapons:
The machine gun was pretty standard, but it was nice how accurate you had to be with the bombs, right down to the speed your plane was going. 2/10

Enemies:
The ground targets were standard, but I have mixed feelings on the planes. Were they limited, I would say they're pretty effective enemies, but an unlimited number of enemy planes makes the whole point moot. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Pretty standard. Not good, not bad, just sort of there. 3/10

Player Agency:
Were it just for the standard mode, I would say the game controls pretty well, but once the game made the jump to serious air combat, the flaws in the controls were pretty apparent. It is impossible to shoot and turn at the same time, anything else too, but shooting and turning is important. The keys are just so far apart it's annoying. There are flaws, but it isn't truly awful. 4/10

Interactivity:
Some minor terrain destruction. 1/10

Atmosphere:
Depending on the mode, a pleasant flight over enemy lines or Defcon 1. Either way it was interesting. 2/10

Graphics:
Effective for CGA, but the constant flickering took away some of the appeal. 1/10

Story:
None.

Sound/Music:
Despite being PC speaker, not too awful. Helps that an engine is one of the few things it does well. 2/10

That's 17, making it the current front runner for GOTY. It's early days yet though.

There is a sequel, the imaginatively named Sopwith. No, I didn't leave out a II or a 2 or anything. They named the sequel to this the same thing. Beating all those fancy modern games with their lazy remake names by at least a decade. From what I understand, it's mostly the same game, except with a campaign.