Sopwith (PC) Review

Date purchased: Unknown
Price paid: N/A
Dates played: Aug. 17, 2019
Playtime: ~10m
Date reviewed: Aug. 17, 2019
Date posted: Feb. 16, 2023
Rating: 6/10

Took less than 10 min to beat single player mode with the maximum 1800 points.

The game was created to demonstrate the "Imaginet" proprietary networking system developed by BMB Compuscience, so it's rather barebones. In single player mode, you simply have to destroy the 17 buildings and tanks on the ground with your compliment of five lives. You get a limited amount of bombs and bullets, as well as limited fuel. The multiplayer and single player against computer modes are simply a dogfight where you either try to outscore your opponent or get as many points as you can against the CPU, getting points for each of your enemy's Sopwith Camels that you shoot down, or get to crash, as well as destroying its buildings and tanks on the ground, while losing points for every one of your planes and buildings/tanks that gets destroyed. It does actually have situations where you can stall out your plane, and you are able to recover before crashing, which I guess would be a somewhat impressive inclusion in a system demonstration game from 1984. It has a handful of sound effects, from the constant buzzing of the planes' engines, bullets firing, the whistle sound of the bombs falling, and the first couple bars of the Merry Melodies theme when a building/tank is destroyed.

As with most games from that time period, you will have to run it through DOSBox, or some other slowdown utility, in order to make it playable on a recent PC.