Jackal is a 1986 run-and-gun game from Konami, released to arcades in October of that year as Top Gunner in North America and ported to many consoles and home computers afterward. The NES version is the one most people know, and it is a lean, loud, cooperative shooter that has aged better than most of its arcade generation.
The Mission
The Jackal unit is four soldiers, Colonel Decker, Lieutenant Bob, Sergeant Quint and Corporal Grey, trained to survive anywhere. Their job is to drive two armed jeeps into hostile territory, rescue prisoners of war and get them out. That is the whole story, and the game tells it in about a sentence before handing you the keys.
The Jeep
You drive from above. The jeep’s machine-gun turret always fires upward, which sounds like a limitation and is actually the design. It forces you to think about position rather than aim. The second button launches grenades in the direction the jeep is facing, and the grenade launcher upgrades into a missile launcher that can be improved further. Managing those two weapons, one fixed and one directional, is the skill the game is testing.
Two Jeeps
Jackal is built for two players, and a second player can join at any time. The jeeps are numbered on their hoods so you know which is yours. Cooperative play is where the game sings. Covering a partner’s flank, splitting the enemy fire, racing each other to a downed prisoner: the game is designed around a second jeep in a way few of its contemporaries were.
The Rescue
Prisoners are the point. You free them, load them into the jeep and carry them to the extraction point, and the rescue loop gives every stage a rhythm beyond shooting. It also gives the game stakes. A jeep full of prisoners is worth protecting, and losing it hurts.
Where It Falls Short
It is short and it is hard, and the difficulty is of the memorization kind. Enemy placements are fixed and unforgiving, and the later stages punish a single mistake with a long walk back. The upward-only turret, clever as it is, makes some encounters more awkward than tense. And the story is a placeholder, which was fine in 1986 and is fine now, but it means the game has nothing beyond its mechanics to hold you.
The Verdict
Jackal is a compact, well-built action game whose two-player design still holds up. It is not a classic on the scale of Konami’s bigger names, but it is an honest hour of cooperative fire, and the NES version is the way to have it.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
