Action Force

Action Force belongs to the licensing wave that British publishers ran hard through the second half of the eighties. Released in 1987, it draws on the action figure line that nearly every child in the United Kingdom recognised at the time. For a publisher these deals were a low-risk proposition: the brand needed no introduction and the cassette inlay did much of the selling on its own.

On the ZX Spectrum the game uses an overhead viewpoint, a sensible choice for military action. Looking down let designers show a wider battlefield, place enemies on all sides of the player and build progress into the depth of the screen rather than only left to right. It also suited the machine graphically, since the colour clash caused by the attribute grid was far less obvious than it would be with large side-view sprites.

By 1987 the Spectrum scene had professionalised. Games were produced by small studios contracted by publishers, released in recognisable packaging and fought for placement in the sales charts printed by the magazines. Quality across licensed titles varied enormously in this period: some were carefully designed action games, others were assembled quickly around a logo and shipped before the licence went cold.

On OldGame.cz you can launch Action Force directly in your browser and form your own opinion without installing an emulator. Expect period conventions, though: limited lives, no progress saving, and a difficulty curve built on the assumption that players would repeat the same opening dozens of times. As a sample of the era's output it holds up better as a document than as a modern time sink.