Aero Fighters

The Game

Aero Fighters was originally released in arcades in 1992 in Japan under the name Sonic Wings, and was released in both North America and Europe under the name Aero Fighters. It was then ported to the SNES a year later in 1993. With no European release on the SNES, the only version we got over here was the arcade original.

It was developed by Video System who developed a lot of arcade games in the 90s and various ports to consoles, they eventually moved into developing console F1 racing games before pretty much dropping off the radar. They still existed and sold the rights to their games, and didn't officially dissolve until 2025.

The SNES port was published by Mc O'River who only ever published 5 games including this one, their last being a 1993 arcade game called Lethal Crash Race. They were a short lived North American Subsidiary of Video System.

Gameplay

The game is a classic vertical shooter, you choose one of 4 nationalities, each with 4 different planes. American, Japanese, Swedish, and British, and work your way through 7 levels. It's not quite bullet hell levels of insanity, but it does get very hectic at times and I did find it suffered a bit of slow down because of it, but because I'm not playing on original hardware I can never be sure if that would've been the case in 1993.

Each character has a vague story, I chose the British character first and he was trying to rescue his fiancee before their wedding. The American just decided at the end to become a movie star, very basic stories, nothing too exciting.

The game does shine with its gameplay, you have 4 levels of weaponry to upgrade to, and a screen clearing attack, all of which are different for each character. The British guy calls in a bomb run, the American drops what seems to be a small nuke, the Swedish fires a collection of homing missiles, and the Japanese has a huge beam that wipes out anything in front of you. A fairly typical thing for an arcade shmup, it plays pretty well and doesn't out stay its welcome. The only thing I wasn't keen on was the firing, you can't just hold down fire, you press the button and it fires a single barrage of shots, then stops. To continually fire you have to constantly mash the button, which got very uncomfortable after a while! A nice knock off controller with a turbo button would have made short work of that in 1993 though so it wouldn't have been the worst situation.

Each level has a boss, once the boss has been beaten you fly off to a world map to see your next destination, and you're straight back in the action. It looks and feels just like an arcade game, designed for beating high scores and not for getting a long term investment.

Graphics

It's a fantastic looking game, the sprites are lovely, the levels look well detailed for the most part. The city level is the best looking, with high rise buildings you can cause damage to as you fly past, it's colourful with bright explosions, orange bullets that make it easy to see and dodge (if you're not as shit at shmups as I am that is) the characters all have their own sprites in the cut scenes and they all look good. It looks like a 90s arcade game brought onto your home TV screen, which is exactly the sort of thing people loved.

The bosses are all pretty varied visually, although a few of them are a case of something that opens up into something else with loads of guns on it. Mechanically they are very similar, but they look pretty cool. The only down side to the graphics really is variation in the general enemy design. Enemy planes, choppers, tanks, and boats are pretty much all you see. There's some ground guns and some buildings that spawn enemies that can be destroyed, but when you move from one level to another very different looking level but fight the same enemies it does feel like a bit of a missed opportunity. Then the last level is set in space, for some reason, and you fly your completely normal aircraft into space, and the enemies do look different, but they're probably the most boring looking enemies in the game sadly.

Sound & music

The game suffers from an issue that comes up a lot in games of this era, the soundtrack is a banger, but the tracks are so short and just repeated throughout the level that you end up getting a bit numb to them. 24 tracks on the soundtrack and it's only 19 minutes long. It's such a shame because if you listen to the tracks here you can see the potential.

Sound is about what you'd expect, explosions and gunfire, that's about it. It works well, it's an arcade port so there isn't really much more to it.

The People

The sound was done by two different people, Naoki Itamura and Masami Yamana. Naoki Itamura worked on most of the games Video System made, and seems to stop in the industry at the same time they did. Masami Yamana went into programming and ended up working on both the Mario Kart arcade versions, but not much more after that.

Kazuo Yagi was the lead programmer for the game, and prior to this had worked on the NES version of Ghosts N Goblins. He was also credited on the 2004 GBA port of Ghosts N Goblins, there was then a 13 year gap before he worked on Dragon Quest XI as a mini game programmer, and has worked on two Dragon Quest games since one of which released in 2024.

The people that did the design for the game all ended up working on similar Video System games, but nothing that stood out too much.

Box art

Now this is some cool box art, it looks like it's taken straight from a movie like Top Gun, a jet taking off, that person that waves their arms around for whatever reason, the colour scheme, it's just all eye catching, and exactly what good box art should be.

As for the back, you've got your standard 4 screenshots laid out in a square, they've gone for an interesting selection of screenshots, all bosses, and I'm pretty sure 2 of them are from the final level.

There's some nice images of the characters too and some information about them, interestingly though I couldn't find a way to play as half of them in the game, I can only assume that it's for the 2 player mode if you select the same nationality.

No bullet points this time, but for some reason I can't quite get my head around the text, I'm not sure why, it feels like once you get to the end that it just doesn't flow properly, and doesn't make sense. But it could just be me, I am pretty tired.

Also weird that they spoil the outer space part on the back because it's played off as a "shock" moment in the very minimal story the game has.

Overall I give this box a rating of - Accurate. It's another one that doesn't really make any promises so can't lie about anything.

The Press

GamePro:

Lovers of shooter games won't be able to resist a play or two or ten. But Aero Fighters' action won't stay with you - it's a temporarily thrill that eventually retreats to the hangar.

3.5/5

Video Games & Computer Entertainment:

If you're a fan of shooters, Aero Fighters is one of the better ones on the market; just don't count on it to be the last word in the genre. This isn't the Super Street Fighter II of shooters, just a pretty good game that you might not care about playing in a year's time.

6/10

Not many reviews for this one out there, but they have similar thoughts to me it seems, great fun but no real staying power.