Sega Ages: G-LOC Air Battle

While not as packed or well known as some of the previous SEGA AGES releases, G-LOC Air Battle is still a great addition to the lineup. If you like After Burner and Out Run, then you will feel right at home here. New players can also pick this one up and get the hang of it right away. It’s not a must own, but more of a quick pick up and play game. If you are looking for dogfight action found in games like Ace Combat, you aren’t going to find it here. Just a simple Arcade quarter-muncher designed to challenge and sometimes frustrate you. I say try it out, you may like it.

SEGA AGES: G-LOC Air Battle is an incredibly solid port of an arcade classic. It is well remastered and adds some nice tweaks, like a more forgiving auto targeting system. Unfortunately, it fails to live up to the original experience without the arcade cabinet it was designed for and you'll be left feeling the need... the need for speed.

As always, M2 did a superb job with the overall package of this Sega Ages release. Cool borders, screen filters, a clean and concise online manual, online rankings, and just all of the top quality production we’ve come to expect is included here. Still, I can’t say G-LOC Air Battle is a game I will play very often at all, but I am really glad that it got the M2 treatment and finally has arrived in a home release, decades after its original arcade debut.

G-LOC is by no means the best game of this type Sega’s released, but it's serviceable and fun. The Sega Ages port is, as usual, excellent. However, morso than many of Sega’s games from this era, G-LOC certainly shows its age. If you’re a fan of this type of game, you’ll likely have a great time, but if you’re not sure, there are better places to start your sprite-scaling journey.

While it falls a bit short in terms of content and variation of gameplay, EGA Ages: G-LOC Air Battle is still pleasant enough to play today, albeit in short bursts - just like in the arcades. Furthermore, by virtue of being one of the very few entries in the SEGA Ages to have only rarely or even never received a proper faithful conversion to console, this is an important type of release that SEGA should feel encouraged to pursue. There is much to be loved about its back catalogue, but there should be more to the SEGA Ages line than mostly Master System and Mega Drive ports or the sempiternal Super Scaler titles that people have seen ported numerous times already. This is an additional step in the right direction SEGA!