It’s heavy because of all the fish that you shoot in a barrel, amirite?

One or two player excitement!

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 12/27/21 – 1/2/22
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 5/10
My Video: Heavy Barrel Longplay

In Take On The NES Library lore, Ikari Warriors was something of a landmark game. At the time I was only somewhat aware of its reputation as a difficult game and its undercooked yet expanded NES port. That all changed when I took on the challenge for myself. Ikari Warriors proved to me two things: 1) This challenge was going to be more than I bargained for, and 2) I can beat the most difficult games that the console can dish out. But it also taught me a third thing: I enjoy top-down action games. 100 hours of repeated attempts in Ikari Warriors didn’t stop me from having a good time while I was doing it, and that’s true even considering all the game’s flaws that came along with it. I was excited to tackle Heavy Barrel and it was indeed an enjoyable ride.

Heavy Barrel was released in arcades in 1987. The game was developed and published by Data East. A few ports to other systems would hold off for a few years, beginning with the Apple II and DOS ports in 1989 by a company called Quicksilver Software. The NES version was released in March 1990 in North America, and it came out on the Famicom in Japan in that same month, a rare simultaneous release. The NES version was developed and published by Data East. The only home release of the arcade version was on the Data East Arcade Classics compilation on the Wii in 2010.

A bunch of enemies are no problem here.

Heavy Barrel is a top-down action shooting game for up to two-players simultaneously. In this game, a terrorist group has captured a nuclear missile site as well as the underground complex that houses the weapons. Your mission is to sneak inside and take out the terrorist threat before they can launch the nukes. The one big piece that will help you out is the Heavy Barrel, a superweapon strong enough to give you a fighting chance. Luckily it has not fallen into enemy hands, as the Heavy Barrel was disassembled and its six pieces scattered across the complex. The entire mission consists of seven levels.

Using the D-pad, you can walk and aim in eight directions. While the arcade version had a rotary joystick that allows you to aim and move in different directions, in this port you can only fire in the direction you are facing. You get two different types of weapons. Limited use grenades are thrown with the B button, and you fire your current weapon with the A button. Start pauses the game.

This game is almost an auto-scroller. This is a linear game with a defined path, simply move toward the edge of the screen to advance through the stage. The scrolling speed is rather slow, and you can walk quite a bit faster than that, so most of the time you are moving ahead and waiting for the camera to catch up. Some parts of the game are pure auto-scrolling, so there’s that too. There are additional weapons in the game that are contained in lockers. To open the lockers, you need keys, which you can obtain by defeating red enemies and picking them off the ground. You can hold up to four keys at once, displayed on the bottom status bar. Over the course of the game, there are more lockers than keys available, so you get to pick and choose the lockers you want. Across multiple playthroughs you’ll learn which items to grab and which to skip. This is where the slow, manual scrolling plays in your favor, since you can freely (but slowly) backtrack a bit to grab the contents of a locker you couldn’t open before.

Choose which items to open to survive.

The lockers may contain various types of guns and grenades. When you upgrade either one, an ammo counter will populate at the bottom to help you narrow down which weapon you obtained. If you die, you go back to your starting weapons. The machine gun is the default firearm that shoots an infinite number of small bullets. The pellet gun is this game’s spread shot, shooting a fan of five bullets at a time, with a limit of 90 shots. The flamethrower fires a large powerful shot, also limited to 90 bullets. The manual mentions a laser gun in the manual, but I’m not convinced that it appears in the game at all. The standard grenade is a blue grenade that is lobbed slowly. The super grenade is red and does big splash damage when it lands. The mace temporarily swings around you and damages what it touches. The smoke bomb is fired straight and stops after a certain distance, lingering in the air for a little while and continually damaging whatever it touches. All grenade drops give you 40 of them and it is possible to get more than 40 by grabbing another of the same kind.

There are a few other special items obtained via the lockers. The star shield behaves like the mace except you get three of them circling you and they eventually slow down as their energy depletes. You can also collect 1ups. The best rewards to look out for are the pieces of the Heavy Barrel. As you find pieces, it fills up a gun shaped meter on the bottom right. When you collect all 6 parts, you can wield the Heavy Barrel, which fires massive bullets straight ahead. Instead of ammo-based, the Heavy Barrel is time-based, so you can shoot to your heart’s content until you run out of time. The Heavy Barrel even survives should you take an untimely death. You get 99 game-seconds of time, then you go back to your previous weapon and can begin rebuilding Heavy Barrel for next time.

You begin the game with three lives. After dying you respawn where you died, so you always make forward progress. When you run out of lives you can continue up to three times. Continuing also restores you to the spot of death, which is quite appreciated! Heavy Barrel can also be played with a friend simultaneously. Multiplayer is not my focus and so I can’t speak about this experience at all, but I can assume that the journey goes more smoothly with a friend. Not many NES games support two player co-op so that is certainly a nice feature.

The Heavy Barrel makes short work of everything.

This was my first time playing Heavy Barrel. This is a common game, but also one that doesn’t come up all that often either, if that makes sense. I got my copy in an eBay bulk lot, and I know I had sold a spare copy at one point too. The game was worth about $10 when I got mine, and that price has gone up since then, around $20 at the time of this writing.

Beating this game followed the standard NES game progression where I got further into the game each time. This is the kind of game that is generous enough with lives and continues that you can get far on a first play. I beat this back in early 2022 and gave it another attempt recently just to re-familiarize myself with the game. This time, I didn’t play all that well and didn’t retain much information from when I last played it, and I still managed to reach the second-to-last level. My winning playthrough needed close to 10 tries to finish. I found the final boss to be quite the difficulty spike. There are a few similar bosses in the game that have these claws that reach out toward you. The final boss can stretch them out at angles that are difficult to deal with. Your character is not quite fast enough to dash out of harm’s way unless you have a walking head start. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite possible to reach the final boss with the Heavy Barrel, as that would have certainly made short work of it. For the most part, NES games just aren’t that easy! I had to get to the end with most of my lives and continues intact just to win through attrition. Not the ideal method but it worked!

Heavy Barrel is a good action game that overall feels ordinary. The game has some neat graphical effects such as the many split-screen auto-scrolling elevator sections, and some of the bullet and enemy sprites are rather large. Despite all that, I find the graphics generally to be pretty rough on the whole, in my opinion. It’s something about the style of an arcade conversion, or the developer, or the color palette, or something else I can’t quite put my finger on. It looks to me more like a 1987 or 1988 game than a 1990 game. That’s really the only thing I dislike about Heavy Barrel. The music is suitable for this game and carries the action appropriately. The controls are accurate and work as expected. It’s not the same as having a rotary joystick to aim and move separately, but most of the time the current control scheme is manageable. I really do enjoy these top-down action games and Heavy Barrel fits right in.

#183 – Heavy Barrel