Tunnel Hawk

Old-school video games had a tendency to be quite difficult, which forced the players to put a lot of effort into them and try for hours on end to pass a certain stage. Nowadays, in the era of autosave and almost constant checkpoints, nothing truly is that difficult. However, there are games that keep the old traditions alive and they enjoy torturing the players using a variety of frustrating mechanics.

Tunnel Hawk is a classic arcade game in which your main goal is to survive the levels, while also trying to collect a few diamonds along the way. The ship you are driving down into an endless tunnel cannot stop, so you have to keep dodging the obstacles as fast as you can. Not only that, but both the gameplay and the visual presentation are retro in nature, so every old-school gamer should be bombarded by flashbacks.

There’s not much of a story going on in the background, because you don’t need to know an awful lot about what’s happening. As long as you keep going deeper and avoiding the obstacles lying ahead, it doesn’t matter what the end goal is. However, the diamonds seem to be what you are after, because the game counts how many you manage to pick up, although nothing really happens no matter how many you collect.

The gameplay mechanics are quite punishing, in the sense that you only need to touch one pixel of your ship with an obstacle or a nearby wall in order for the entire game to reset. Not only that, but the deeper you manage to reach, the faster the ship goes, which is mighty annoying and frustrating at the same time. However, it does make the experience that much more intense.

In an attempt to both look and feel retro at the same time, the game also sports pixelated graphics, which should go well with the genre. It also has the effect to increase the nostalgia in slightly more experienced players, which might secure the game a few more fans. The game’s soundtrack is a bit off, but even that can appeal to some fans, probably.

In the end, Tunnel Hawk may have the right idea, but it’s just too repetitive to be worth more than a few minutes of gameplay. Sure, the levels appear to be randomized, but since there are only two types of obstacles you have to deal with, you’ve basically seen it all after the first 5-10 tries, which are going to be very short and frustrating anyway.