Sarge

Those few seconds when your shots land exactly on target has something defiant about it in Sarge. Then you just stare at the screen with the expression of a guy who's just gotten tired. This late-eighties DOS arcade shooter stands up as a nimble thing for a while, but repeatedly frustrates you by not clearly saying what's happening and why.

Sarge puts you behind a machine gun in an isometric perspective (or something that mimics it) who must defend your positions against advancing enemy waves. You shoot from above downward, move yourself in limited space, and try to catch ammo and health that falls from destroyed enemies. The game runs in a mode where you're constantly completing simple tasks — stay alive and do as much damage as possible.

Controls are straightforward: movement, shooting, that's the whole program. The problem is that the game sometimes forgets what rules it just set. Bullets fall, disappear, come back; sometimes they hit you around a corner, other times they pass right by like ghosts. Occasionally you fly off the screen and reappear on the opposite side — useful if it worked predictably. Hitboxes aren't perfectly juicy, but for an arcade from 1989 it's at least functional.

Sarge has nothing to say about progressive design or refined mechanics. It's an exact copy of the spirit of eighties arcades — you have points, you have waves of enemies, you have simple graphics and sounds that throw your brain into cold after five minutes. But that's exactly how such things were played when you had time and patience to sit down at a computer for a while. The game doesn't prioritize smoothness, rather raw gameplay without polish.

Today Sarge is mainly a memory of times when arcade shooters didn't have to be boring, just had to fit in the catalog. Graphics won't impress even retro enthusiasts, but that strange touch of obligatory entertainer persists. It plays in the browser without trouble and without worries — it's nothing exceptional, but that's just how a piece of games looked that blew into the nineties.