The mid-90s were an incredible time for gaming. Doom, Doom II, and Quake all showed up, as did the gravity-free FPSes of Descent and Descent II, and the consoles were pumping out classics like it was no big deal. People were getting a little too excited about 3D but at the time it was big and new, shining like the glorious future, providing incredible (if chunky) experiences even as the hardware struggled to keep up. One of the mid-tier releases of 1995 was a free-roaming fly & shoot called Terminal Velocity, and while it didn’t set the world on fire like the major hitters of the time the game was popular enough to be fondly remembered. Now about 28 years after its initial release Terminal Velocity: Boosted Edition gives the game a full rebuild, rescuing the mini-classic from the budget racks of history.
There’s probably a plot in Terminal Velocity, seeing as it’s got a cinematic rendered in the best CGI 1995 could cram on a CD-ROM, but the action is the important thing. You fly a fighter ship armed with various types of lasers, guns, and missiles, plus a booster to get out of trouble quickly. The ship flies over the surface of a planet covered with alien outposts guarded by enemy craft, and you’ve got free reign to approach the fight any way you’d like. A little arrow on the HUD points out the next objective, but wandering off course can reward you with power-ups that increase the ship’s firepower, not to mention boosts, shield, and the occasional secret tunnel. It’s a straight-up action shooter, a little short on depth but perfect for hopping into and seeing low-poly 1990s enemies shatter into fragments from a relentless laser barrage.
Terminal Velocity: Boosted Edition isn’t a remaster so much as a rebuild, the original game with its original chunky-texture style, but tweaked with a good number of upgrades to help with the aging. The ever-present fog has been pushed back significantly, although with the trade-off that you can see enemies before they react to your presence, and other graphics upgrade like translucent shadows and proper widescreen support make the game look its best on modern hardware. The only real knock against it is that the controller support is a bit weak, missing the ability to map rolling the ship to the L/R buttons. In a game where the surface of the world is constantly spinning around as you spiral from one dogfight to the next, having the roll stranded on the keyboard makes righting the ship an inconvenience, although there is an auto-level function available.
Terminal Velocity may not be a major classic but it was certainly a lot of fun, and it holds up as well today as it did back when it was new. Gaming has gone through a lot of changes over the years but some things have remained constant, such as the sheer entertainment value of doing a strafing run over an an enemy compound while its defenders try to shoot you from the skies. It’s great to see Terminal Velocity get a new lease on life with the Boosted Edition, tearing up the pixel-clouded skies like 1995 was only five minutes ago.
