Fort Apocalypse Title Screen
Early in my video gaming life, one of the first computer games I ever played was Dan Gorlin’s classic Choplifter on my cousin’s Apple II. The simple presentation, on that glowing monochrome green CRT, was instantly addictive. When we got our Commodore 64 some time later, it was one of the first games I sought out. I was pleasantly surprised that the game translated nicely to the C64, but that is a story for another article. More important to this article is the game a friend of mine introduced me to, not long after that. The game seemed to me to be an evolution of the Choplifter formula I had fallen in love with: rescuing people, but now with the added challenge of more advanced combat, as well as navigating underground caverns. That game was Fort Apocalypse, published by Synapse Software. While I later found out the game wasn’t quite what I’d assumed, it didn’t change my opinion. That opinion remains all these years later.
First off, it is commonly assumed (as I did) that Fort Apocalypse is simply a more advanced Choplifter clone. Designer Steve Hales has gone on record to refute that, stating that he actually developed the concept for the game nearly 6 months before Gorlin’s hit came on the scene. He claims the idea for the game came from a dream about helicopters. The game was originally developed for the Atari 8-bit line of micros, and Synapse released the initial version in 1982. The C64 conversion, ported by Steve Hales, was released a year later. The game’s visual aesthetic is strongly informed by its Atari 8-bit roots, giving it an early-’80s action-game look and feel. But don’t let the looks distract you. This game is interesting, challenging, and, more importantly, fun.
Fort Apocalypse
Starting off at the top of the cavernous Fort Apocalypse, you must descend into the depths, rescuing prisoners. avoiding and taking out enemies, and dodging obstacles along the way. As you descend through the levels of caves, you must use your rockets and plasma bombs strategically to eliminate the obstructions between you and the goal on the bottom level, which will send you even deeper into the fort. But make sure to keep an eye on your fuel level. If it gets too low, you’ll have to head back to the fueling station to refuel before continuing your descent. Once you make it to the final room, you use a well-armed rocket to destroy the fort. But, you’re not finished. You must then make it back through the caverns, avoiding the same obstacles and enemies that hindered your initial progress, to the exit to actually win the game.
Something that makes Fort Apocalypse more than your bog-standard shooter is its strategic elements. First, your weapons are not controlled by different firing triggers, as they are in other games. They are instead determined by your helicopter’s orientation. If you are facing sideways, your chopper will fire its rockets. But when you rotate to face the screen, you will drop your plasma bombs. This adds a challenge to the cramped combat conditions deep in the caverns. You’ll need to rotate to drop your bombs to destroy the barriers allowing you access to the deeper levels of the fort, but at the same time, you’ll need to rotate sideways to fire rockets as enemies eventually appear from off-screen to eliminate you.
Fort Apocalypse
Helping you in combat and navigation is your navatron radar system. Similar to the early-warning radar system in Defender, you see a miniaturized version of approximately 6 times more area than you can see on the main screen, showing you enemies, barriers, and prisoners to be rescued. This really helps as you plan your movements through the game, and is essential, should you make it as far as destroying the fort, for finding your way back out to the surface.
As I said at the beginning of the review, the game may look primitive, but that belies its strategic gameplay and “just one more time” playability. Fort Apocalypse does what the best retro games do: balance difficulty with gameplay that is not so frustrating as to make you rage-quit and never come back to it. If you give it a chance, you will find yourself sinking hours into the game, trying to make it further into the caverns of the fort before you’re blasted by a missile launcher or crushed by a moving wall. I won’t say that a controller or two wasn’t lobbed across the room at times back in the day, but I always picked it up again and gave it another go.
While it wasn’t inspired by the classic, Fort Apocalypse benefits from the familiarity with the rescue gameplay that Choplifter made famous. But it expands on the concept, giving us a game that is part Choplifter, part Spelunker, part Scramble, and all fun. Definitely seek this one out if you’re looking for a retro shooter challenge.
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