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"A good attempt, but doesn't get it quite together"

Ported from the 1981 arcade original to the Commodore 64 in 1983, Gorf is your basic shooter game with our heavily armed ship at the bottom of the screen, moving left and right and shooting at the enemies coming from above. Nothing too noteworthy here, but Gorf has four levels which differ enough to provide some welcome variety. Nevertheless, none of them are particularly interesting, and so despite the good attempt, Gorf doesn't keep you entertained for long.

The first level of Gorf is a direct rip-off of Space Invaders, with a formation of aliens moving left and right, dropping down whenever they hit the edge of the screen, meanwhile shooting at you. Upon cleaning them out, you are taken to a second level where two small enemy fleets hang above you, firing lasers at you and occasionally sending out individual ships to attack you. The third stage features one enemy ship after another appearing in the middle of the screen and flying in ever larger circles while shooting at you, and the final one has you fight against an enemy capital ship slowly moving left and right, dropping the occasional bomb at you, but basically waiting for you to place a precision hit on its reactor to blow it up. After you do, it's back to the first stage, and the whole game repeats itself at a higher speed, with more enemies, and more projectiles heading your way.

Now granted, four such different levels is more than the average early arcade shooter has to offer. There's nothing here we haven't seen before, though. The first level that is 100% Space Invaders is the most blatant copy, but none of the other levels are particularly original either. Nothing that would make you say ''now *that* is Gorf''. The levels are not exactly balanced, either - you typically breeze through level 1, 2 and 4, and lose most or all of your lives in level 3. Time spent in each of the levels is relatively short - a minute per level is all you will need, perhaps two in level 3, and so even an experienced player's game is unlikely to last more than 15-20 minutes.

Between its lack of originality in a crowded genre and the quick pace of the game, Gorf's success stands or falls entirely with how the game plays. And unfortunately, it doesn't play well. The controls are good enough - your craft moves smoothly in the direction indicated and the fire button fires your shots straight up, easy enough. One little quirk is that you can have only one shot on the screen at a time and if you fire a second one before the first has hit something or flown off the top of the screen, it disappears. A common beginner's fault is firing so quickly that no shot actually reaches their target, but with a little practice you'll find a good, comfortable firing speed without missing anything by early withdrawal.

But even though the controls are simple and solid, just the way you'd want them in a shooter, the gameplay is very quirky at times. In the first level, the aliens appear one by one and only when the last has come into existence, the formation starts moving. An experienced player soon learns to put his craft right under where the enemies are going to appear, and cleans them all up before they even arrive. A similar trick can be used in the second level to pick off the formations before the level has even begun. The enemy mothership in the final level puts up no challenge whatsoever, except when you've played through the four levels a few times and it starts spamming the entire screen with projectiles. All of the game's challenge goes into the third level, the space warp with the circling enemies, but this level is challenging for the wrong reason: the enemies frequently get off shots at unavoidable angles, and usually your survival or death depends on luck and not on what you do. The result? Gorf is entertaining the first few times, but soon you realize the game comes down to rushing through three of the four levels and losing lives unfairly in one of them. You play, you shoot, you gain points, but there's very little fun in it if the game consists of three ridiculously easy levels and one unfair one.

And that's how it is with Gorf - it lacks that addictiveness that the good shooters have, and there's really no high point to the game. The controls are good, the levels have some variety, graphically it's not so bad - colourful, at least - and the sound effects are bearable, with only one annoying 'whirrr' noise that the circling enemies in the third level make. But gameplay is lacking, and even in its era Gorf had stiff competition from other shooters. I don't know how well it did in the arcades, but on the Commodore, there are dozens of better shooters, and Gorf does not advance beyond the level of games that are fun to play once or twice, after which you put them away, forever to collect dust on their tape or disk.

Gorf is worth a play for the Commodore fan, if only to see how it fails to live up to its potential. With more work on the levels, making each of them moderately challenging but without creating frequent unfair death situations, this could have been a contender. As it is, I don't recommend this for a rainy afternoon - you'll be bored of it well before dusk.



Reviewer's Score: 4/10 | Originally Posted: 07/15/02, Updated 07/15/02