My Played Video Games Review: Elevator Action for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)

Elevator Action is a platform action shooter game, developed by Taito of Japan for the arcades in 1983. It was later ported for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and released in North America in 1987.

I played this game through pirated compilation games cartridges commonly sold in my country during the late 1980s.

The Story

You're a master spy with a mission to infiltrate a building full of armed guards, and recover some top secret documents from various floors. Take your semi-automatic pistol, and go do the mission given to you in that thirty floor skyscraper.

The Graphics and Sound

The graphics are of the 4-bit quality of the early 1980s era of Atari. Not much has changed from the arcade version. Everything else is a bit ugly. The enemies only got two colors and the levels have dull colors as you progress.

The only nice thing about the graphics is that when you shoot a light bulb, the whole building gets dark. Really, the graphics are below average.

The music sucks, but the sound effects are pretty good. Your gunshots makes a cool shot sound and enemies make a little thud when they die. It is nothing great, but it is good enough.

The Gameplay

Elevator Action is quite fun to play. Most of the time you climb down a 30 story building and steal secret documents in rooms with red doors. Once you found all the documents, you must escape to your car at the bottom of the building.

Enemies will come out of doors and try to kill you. So you must use all of your skills to do the mission. You can kill enemies only by shooting, but it is more fun to trap them under elevators, shoot the light bulbs to fall on their heads, or kick them.

But, the controls are less than ideal. Jumping is kinda slow, and to open doors or go down the elevators, one must press down or up in exactly the right place. When your character ducks, you must press up again to stand up.

My Verdict

Elevator Action is a nice, old arcade-style game that is still fun to play. That is, if you do not mind the repetitive gameplay and dated visuals. Stay away if you want a long and varied game.

Do try it on the NES or on emulators.

Let's keep on gaming in the free world!