Developed by Random Access and published by Storm in 1991.

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Special Weapons Intercept Vehicle (SWIV) is an arcade shooter developed for multiple home computing platforms including the Commodore 64, Spectrum and Amiga. The game is a sequel to Silkworm, another popular shoot 'em up released a few years earlier that was remembered for it's asymmetrical multi-player with one player controlling an attack chopper, whilst the other drove along the ground in an armoured Jeep.

The premise here is very similar to it's predecessor, although the perspective has shifted from horizontal to top-down. Perspective aside, the objective remains the same; kill things to earn points and survive.

The helicopter can move freely over the battlefield and can avoid collisions with ground vehicles, whilst the Jeep must avoid ground clutter/obstacles but won't collide with aircraft. Both vehicles are armed with front-facing missiles that can only be upgraded by collecting power-up tokens dropped by Goose helicopters that appear periodically throughout the game.

The power-up tokens themselves can be shot to change the bonus that will be conveyed once collected. Perhaps the most useful of these is the spread shot that increases the cone of fire and is pretty much mandatory to survive in later stages of the game. Should you manage to shoot a power-up token fifty times then it will transform into a star that grants you eight-way simultaneous fire; great for hitting enemies from all angles but the shots lack any real power. I found that I couldn't switch back to the regular spread or cluster shots so had no option but to die to get rid of it.

One of the most distinctive features about the game is the complete absence of separate levels. Unlike most shooters, SWIV's gameplay is a single, uninterrupted level that loads progressively from the disk the further you get. The scrolling will occasionally stop as you take on a boss, but there is a complete lack of loading screens and is a really cool feature.

The other thing that stands out about SWIV is the crushing difficulty. Things start out easily enough, but the difficulty ramps up drastically after the first boss. The screen rapidly fills with enemies, many of which shoot multiple projectiles at you (some of which home in on you!) and it becomes almost complete luck when you somehow manage to survive some of the attack waves that you face. It's almost a relief when you manage to collect a force field bubble and get a few seconds to take a breather!

From a technical standpoint SWIV is certainly an impressive feat given the number of sprites that appear on screen at any given moment. However, on a stock Amiga 500 with 1mb of memory the game can slow down on a regular basis and the drop in frame-rate can make it very difficult to avoid oncoming enemies and bullets. There were numerous occasions where I would seem to explode at random; I even watched some of the recorded footage back and couldn't work out what killed me, so I can only conclude that certain sprites weren't rendering correctly when things got busy.

From an aesthetics view SWIV features some excellent graphics. The artwork is very detailed and all of the vehicle sprites are highly detailed and the animation of the helicopter rotor blades is a nice touch; everything about the artwork shouts high production values and this looks as good as any coin-op shooter of the day that you'd care to mention.

Perhaps even more impressive than the graphics are the sound effects. The game features some absolutely fantastic explosions and I remember my dad being particularly impressed when I used run this up on my A500 as a child! Even the smallest enemy meets it's demise with a massive conflagration and speaker-rumbling "kaboom"!

I remember that SWIV was probably the second or third Amiga game that I played and my Commodore 64 would be forever relegated to the attic. SWIV might be unforgiving, but it's still a great shooter and was certainly a showcase for what the Amiga could do at the time of release.
#retrogaming

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