In a world wracked with internecine tanks-falling-out-of-the-sky-in-the-desert warfare, you are the elitest of the elite, the crackest of the crack, the creamiest of the crop. Inexplicably falling yet again onto a mountainside undamaged, you open the hatch of your main battle tank to look out on the serene desert landscape turned warzone. As the early morning sun glints off the barrel, you begin to wonder whether it's all worth it...whether it will ever end...and whether you will ever see your family again. Suddenly the stillness of the morning is shattered by a shrill whistling sound from high above which gets louder by the second. You swing the hatch shut, turn to your crewmates, and shout that all too familiar refrain: 'Incoming!'
'Incoming!' is an artillery shooting game that can be played between two players, or between one player and the computer. The game is played in rounds. Each round of the game features two tanks, one red and one green, squaring off against one another across a side-view 2-dimensional battlefield. The object is to destroy the other player's tank by lobbing shells across the board and hitting him. Players alternate firing at one another until one player hits the other, at which point that player wins the round and the next round begins. The first player to score a predetermined number of rounds wins the game.
Those familiar with Xonox's Artillery Duel will be familiar with Incoming!'s gameplay mechanics. However, Incoming! has several improvements over Artillery Duel, including:
- 2 players or 1 player vs. the computer
- "Teddy Bear" easy difficulty mode against the computer
- Randomly generated, asymmetrical playfields
- Realistic vector-based physics model
- Adjustable terrain roughness via difficulty switches
- Terrain damage
- Fast gameplay
- Up to 20+ colors on-screen at once
Includes cartridge and a 16-page, full-color manual. The label artwork and manual were created by Holger Bommer, who won the Incoming! Label Contest we held on AtariAge in late 2008.
Incoming! is available in NTSC and PAL television formats, please specify above when ordering.
Author | Ben Larson |
Number of Players | 2 |
Controller | Joystick |
Cartridge Size | 4K |
Label and Manual | Holger Bommer |
While there's already a similar 2600 game called Artillery Duel (by Xonox), Incoming! literally blows that one away. Incoming! has superior graphics, better sound, faster gameplay (Artillery Duel is agonizingly slow), and most critically - more varied and destructible terrain. Incoming! also features both one and two player options, two skill levels, and you can change the number of hits needed to win. The controls for adjusting your angle and power are a bit too responsive, and it can take a fair amount of fussy joystick-tapping to set the values you want. There's also an odd quirk where your tank can hang out in space - suspended by only a single pixel, and the game lacks any sort of congratulatory tune or message when you win, but those are relatively minor complaints.
Incoming! uses a tried and true game formula, and there's a good reason Artillery has been ported to so many systems - it's addictive! The random nature of Incoming! means no two games will ever be the same, and it makes for a perfect quick game against the computer, or for an entire afternoon spent firing salvo after salvo at a friend. Really good two-player competitive games are pretty rare on the 2600, and rarer still are the ones that will also put up a good fight in single player mode. The computer AI is deadly accurate on normal difficulty, but once you get a feel for the game, you can give it a good run for its money. Incoming! is a great adaptation of a classic game, and well worth having in any 2600 game library.
I like to think of it as Worms Lite!
You can play this game one player. The graphics, while not outstanding, are pretty decent, and certainly ranks with the better games for the 2600.