Sometimes you’re playing one game, and you have this unsettling déjà-vu feeling: I’ve played this before! Only you know you are really thinking of a different game.  Fire Shark is an eminent example of this, since it bears more than a little resemblance to Toaplan’s earlier Twin Cobra.

Though the graphics are updated, and you now control a plane rather than a helicopter (don’t worry, this doesn’t introduce any actual changes in game play) the game feels decidedly uninspired.  They might as well have just taken Twin Cobra and switched out the sprites.  That’s what Fire Shark feels like. Sure, it’s fun to fire a flamethrower at hordes of enemies and incinerate the whole screen at once (one of the admittedly awesome power-ups in Fire Shark) but it was also fun to fill the whole screen with blue spread shots in Twin Cobra four years earlier.

There is simply nothing new and original in Fire Shark.  Even the music starts to sound like “Toaplan music”, which by 1991 we have heard many times before.   The play is also just as challenging as Twin Cobra but more aggravating.  The formations of enemy planes swoop down at you unpredictably, making it not so much challenging as plain annoying to stay alive.

My review is short because this game is so bleh. It's not too little, but it is too late. By 1991 the shmup genre needed a shot in the arm and Fire Shark merely goes back to the past. Try Aero Fighters on SNES for a new take on the old formula.

If you have an insatiable urge to blow things up and Fire Shark is your only option, by all means go for it.  But for a 1991 shooter, Fire Shark delivers little more than the fleeting satisfaction of exploding screen after screen of tanks, boats, and planes.  But hey, who doesn’t need that once in a while?