Retro Review: Silver Surfer

Reviewed Platform: NES

Release Year: 1990

Summoned by Galactus, you play as the Marvel character Silver Surfer in this scrolling shooter. You must navigate the levels, shoot baddies and destroy bosses in one of the hardest games known to man.

As you load up the game you could be forgiven for thinking that you’re about to play a half-decent shooter. The premise is sound: you’re a hugely powerful comic book hero taking on bad guys, so you must be in for an exciting time right? Wrong. Silver surfer is one of the hardest and most frustrating games I’ve ever played in my life. Whilst games like Mega Man are challenging but possible, Silver Surfer borders on the ridiculous. It will have you throwing your controller within the first few minutes.

Loading up the game gives you five different levels to choose from in a menu system reminiscent of the aforementioned Mega Man. You can complete them in any order you wish, although the completion part is probably not an outcome; I should really say that you can try them in any order you wish. All of the levels are themed in some way, with one a jungle setting, another a fire cave and so on. They’re not all side-scrolling shooters, though, some are played from the top-down perspective.

As you’d expect, you take on enemies with energy balls that you can fire. Picking up upgrades in the levels (in the form of small, silver balls) allows you to fire more than one projectile, up to a maximum of three. The direction of these can be changed to allow you to fire down or behind you, which come in handy in some areas. There are other power ups, too, which you can use to increase your projectile power or clear the screen of enemies. The levels are divided into sections and at the end of the sections are bosses (although you’ll probably never see them) for you to blast.

All sounds pretty standard so far, doesn’t? Now I’ll explain why this is one of the hardest games ever made. Firstly, you can only take one hit before dying. Touching an enemy kills you, touching a projectile kills you and touching the scenery kills you. Essentially you’re not allowed to come into contact with anything or you die. In comparison, enemies take multiple hits to kill, which makes the game extremely one-sided when you’re always outnumbered and outgunned.

The madness doesn’t stop there: the enemies follow crazy patterns around the screen which are nearly impossible to dodge; the screen is filled with projectiles 90% of the time, your board is massive on the top-down levels and the spaces that you need to fit it through are tiny; when you die you restart from the beginning of the level (or a checkpoint if you can get that far); and you have no idea what scenery will kill you and what won’t (some can be flown over whilst other, identical parts can’t be). So yeah, it’s bloody hard.

Silver Surfer appears to have been thrown together with random sprites because nothing seems to make any sense or fit in. In one level you fight flying lizards and fish, which sound fairly reasonable ( or probably not, on reflection), until you realise that ducks also make an appearance as well. They don’t look like real ducks, either, they’re bright yellow and look like rubber ducks you’d have in a bath. You fight Halloween pumpkins in another level. It’s bizarre. The look of the levels isn’t going to stun you as they’re all pretty standard, composed of dull colour palettes and stock background effects.

The music in Silver Surfer is completely forgettable, and has more in common with a random series of notes than something you could pass off as tune. They’re not going stick in your head and you definitely won’t find yourself humming the tunes to yourself. Effects are pulled from the stock collection of rubbish 8-bit laser sounds and static hiss which sounds like it’s being played through a broken speaker.

Silver Surfer is something that had some potential at some point. If only you could take more than one hit, the scenery didn’t kill you and the enemies were so powerful and plentiful, you might have a playable game. As it is, the only reason you’ll want to play Silver Surfer is to see for yourself how downright hard it is. Alternatively you could be completely insane and want the challenge, but other than that it’s awful. Not the Shaq Fu kind of awful, but not far off.