Blam! Machinehead

Blam! Machinehead was published by Eidos Interactive in 1996 and reached America under the name Machine Head. It is a 3D action game built on an idea you do not see twice: you are not driving a tank or running on foot — you are riding a bomb.

A nanotech plague is devouring the Earth, turning landscape and living creatures alike into a fused mass of meat and machinery. Scientist Kimberly Stride has built a smart bomb, the only weapon capable of destroying the source — but circumstances put her on top of it, and the only way forward is to fly the payload all the way to the epicentre. In practice you hover a few feet above the ground, gliding through ruined countryside and abandoned factories, grabbing weapon power-ups and shooting the mutated horrors the plague keeps throwing in your path.

The game's strength was always its atmosphere. The devastated Earth feels oppressive, the flesh-and-metal monsters are exactly as repulsive as they should be, and the black humour of the interludes holds the tone together. Steering a hovering bomb has a peculiar, drifting feel that takes time to learn — and once it clicks, firefights settle into a pleasing rhythm of circling manoeuvres.

The weaknesses deserve equal billing: thick fog strangles the draw distance so enemies tend to appear at point-blank range, the objectives loop endlessly around fly-here-destroy-that, and the difficulty can be plain unfair. It is an above-average idea inside an average piece of craftsmanship, which is roughly how critics saw it at the time. Still worth an evening, though: few mid-nineties shooters were this confidently strange, and no other game will show you what piloting a flying bomb feels like.

On oldgame.cz the bomb lifts off straight in your browser, with nothing to install.