Narco Terror Review

Where does Narco Terror stand in the twin-stick shooter genre: bottom, top or somewhere in the middle?

Narco Terror is an action-packed twin-stick shooter that thematically harkens back to classic action movies from the 80’s and offers several arcade gameplay sequences. You play as ex-special ops Rick Quinn who is literally a one man army badass dude.

The game starts with a short cutscene where you hear Rick talk about The Cartel, the drugs and the way they are smuggled all over the world. Then he talks about The Cartel’s latest way of smuggling the drugs, by using a frickin submarine. Your task, find and stop the submarine and end all of Cartel’s drug operation. His beloved daughter was kidnapped by drug cartel leader Delgado, to prevent the use of a new tool that could expose the secret narcotics smuggling ring. Quinn is the deadliest weapon around, and will stop at nothing to get his daughter back.

This is your standart twin-stick shooter game, where you will have to kill countless enemies in order to progress through, but near the end a bullet-hell element is kinda added to the game which makes it (sometimes) extremely difficult. As far as I can remember, one twin-stick shooter that I really liked was Gatling Gears, fantastic gameplay, really cool upgrade system and overall just fun to play through. Narco Terror swims in similar waters, it has great gameplay, cool weapons and all of the things that should make it a really great game, but somehow it misses this opportunity.

As I said Rick is one crazy badass dude who faces impossible situations and still manages to survive. He has four weapons at his disposal, a pistol, shotgun, AR and a minigun and you can upgrade each weapon using currency you find in the level as form of collectibles or get for destroying things. However you don’t get all of the weapons from the start, you get them as you play through. Each one of them feels great and has a satisfying impact on enemies and upgrading makes them even better. But the upgrading system is very limited because you don’t get enough currency to upgrade all of the weapons. By the end of the game I had only upgraded each weapon only once cause the first upgrade is cheap, like a 1000 or so $, the other upgrades need from 3000-6000$ and getting this kind of currency is not possible on the first playthrough. So this kinda serves to increase the replay value of the game, making you replay the game to see and unlock everything, but as soon as I finished the game, that was it, I didn’t want to continue playing the game.