Terminal Velocity: Boosted Edition Review

The name Terminal Velocity may sound familiar to you if you played computer games in the 1990s. This is in fact that same game, this is not a remake, but rather a way to make the original game from 1995 available to play on current computer systems. Terminal Velocity: Boosted Edition is an arcade-style flight combat game that offers players a simpler control system and physics than playing a flight simulator. The game allows you to fly a full 360 degrees, shooting down enemy ships, and taking out targets that you are required to destroy to successfully complete your mission.

The game is set in the year 2704, and I love that it is set far enough in the future that we haven’t passed the “future” date — looking at you Chrono Trigger. The alliance of ASFAR — the Alliance of Space Faring Alien Races — turns against the Earth, which is a fellow member. Your main goal is to take out the attacking alien forces and discover why they are attacking. There are three missions to accomplish, with a difficulty selection that lets you select between Easy, Normal, Hard, or Terminal to determine how much of a challenge you will face. After entering your name and call sign (retro for me), then you select the first mission called “Episode One: Tactical Strike”, which has you travelling to Ymir, a planet covered with mountains and snow. The enemy is working on creating a laser system, called the “Gunnar System”. Your objective is to blow up power stations, storage bunkers, and enemy ships. Once accomplished, you head to the tunnel to destroy the enemies and equipment that is set up there. It felt just like I was doing the Kessel run in the “first” Star Wars movie! Then to add to that feeling, the sound effect that you hear whenever a ship flies past you sounds very similar to a tie-fighter in that movie franchise.

Considering the game was originally released on 31st May 1995, the visuals are still actually quite good. They are definitely dated, but the gameplay was fun and, after a while, you don’t even notice. For the soundtrack, it definitely sounds like a product of the 90s, but it’s catchy and quite good, it just constantly loops until you successfully complete that whole mission. The world is incredibly open, so much so that I was flying around for a long period of time and never hit a point where I was turned back. You have a small radar that will have spots showing where an enemy is located or an important spot to visit, but it was tricky to figure out where I was supposed to be going. I’m used to having a map that shows you where everything is located. 

After destroying some enemy ships and structures, I found that I was getting turned around and not sure where to go next. Most of the time, I was randomly flying, just hoping that I would discover an enemy, or the next location I needed to go. After a few hours, I finally noticed that on the top of the screen, there was a counter labelled DIST. I figured it was measuring how far I was flying, but I was totally wrong. This counts how far away you are from the next location you are supposed to go to. Once I realised this, the game and missions became so much more clear, and I wasn’t just cruising around the world taking in the sights! The game didn’t explain this, so I’m glad I finally figured it out. I’m so used to games holding your hand and making a tutorial to show you everything.  

There is no inertia here, so you can fly as slow as you want and you won’t fall out of the sky. This also allows your ship to quickly turn, or fly upside down as long as you want. I was playing the game with an XBOX controller or on the Steam Deck, and I had no issues at all controlling the ship. You also have the option to play using the keyboard and mouse, or a joystick if you happen to have one. On my controller, the left trigger acts as your brakes, which is incredibly useful when you are coming towards your target way too fast that you don’t have time to fire enough shots at it to destroy it before flying fast. If you are going too slow, hit the RT and get a boost of speed from the afterburners. This expedited the amount of time required to fly to the next area of the mission and was needed to avoid obstacles when flying through confined levels like the tunnels. 

Terminal Velocity: Boosted Edition is a short game, there are only nine levels total, but the end of each mission includes a boss fight to get through which adds a bit of challenge. If you run out of shields and your ship is destroyed, you get to put your name on the leaderboard. You don't have to start back from the very beginning of the game again, instead, you start close to where you crashed to try again. I’ve really enjoyed my time playing this classic game; it was a good reminder of what games used to be like when I was a child. If you were a fan of Terminal Velocity when it came out in 1995, you are sure to love this version that is now optimised for widescreens. Or if you are younger and never got to experience older computer games like this, it will make you appreciate how far games have come, while at the same time, showing you how cool these other games were!