Laser Invasion (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Konami's 1991 action game for the NES, Laser Invasion.
Laser Invasion was one of several Konami games that were released as the NES's dominance was beginning to wane. It shares a fair amount of its DNA with The Lone Ranger which also released in the summer of 1991, and like that game, despite its quality, it failed to make much of an impact.
Laser Invasion takes Konami's "everything but the kitchen sink" approach to game design. Like The Adventures of Bayou Billy ( • The Adventures of Bayo... )
and The Lone Ranger ( • The Lone Ranger (NES) ... ), Laser Invasion incorporates three distinct game types in one.
The first is the flight-sim portion. Borrowing heavily from Top Gun: The Second Mission ( • Top Gun: The Second Mi... ), you pilot a helicopter through waves of attacking enemy planes, choppers, tanks, and warships. Unlike in Top Gun, though, each mission takes place in a wide open area and you have full control over where you're going. The map points points out enemy installations that you'll need to visit to gather items and intel before taking on the boss to finish the mission, as well as bases where you can refuel and resupply.
When you land at an enemy base, you'll have to fight your way into the building in an arcade-style first-person light gun section that closely resembles the ones found in Bayou Billy.
Finally, once you've made it into a building, you're faced with a first-person 3D maze, just like in The Lone Ranger. You'll meet with Spider, your informant, to get information and mission objectives, and you'll also need to search for key cards and weapons while fending off enemy ambushes with more Zapper-based shooting galleries. The auto-map is a real boon here, too, making these areas not nearly as the frustrating as the 3D sections in games like Golgo 13: Top Secret Mission ( • Golgo 13: Top Secret E... ).
Once you've finished off these areas, you head toward the boss encounter in your chopper where you'll face off against some huge piece of military hardware.
A lot of people seem to not like Laser Invasion much, and I have to say, I don't understand why. The flight sections are among the most impressive and polished of their type on the NES, and the difficulty has been dialed way back from Top Gun 2's - most of these stages verge on being too easy, believe it or not. The graphics are incredible - enemies cleanly zoom in and out of the screen and the background scrolling, animation, and palette cycling effects are amazingly smooth. Low color depth aside, the fidelity of the graphics and the fluidity of the gameplay rival what you'd see in early 16-bit games. The shooting gallery and maze sections are somewhat less flashy, but they look clean and the sprites are well drawn.
The gameplay overall is excellent. The controls are responsive, the difficulty is generally well balanced, and the variety goes a long way in preventing things from growing stale before the end.
I've always found the Zapper to be the ideal way to handle the shooting sections - good luck to you if you attempt them with a gamepad - but you can also use Konami's LaserScope peripheral that was released alongside the game. It was essentially a Zapper built into a headset with voice-activated shooting, and while it does work, I'm not a fan. It's uncomfortable and gimmicky, and the Zapper does the job just fine on its own.
The only complaint I can level at Laser Invasion is at the boiler plate military theme. The game lacks characters with personality and the "story" is nothing more than a contrivance to rationalize its gameplay mechanics. Still, given how well the gameplay succeeds, that's a minor quibble.
Laser Invasion is another highly ambitious and long forgotten Konami NES classic that deserves some attention. If you haven't played it yet, give it a shot! I had a ton of fun with this one, and if you like any of the game types on offer, chances are good that you'll enjoy it too.
(This is a new playthrough to replace my original video. The video quality is much better and I used the Zapper this time.)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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