Final Combat

Final Combat is a blatant homage to Namco’s Battle City, bringing top-down vehicular combat to the Supervision’s grainy grayscale screen. In an era where every handheld needed a "combat" title to round out its library, this was Watara’s attempt to provide a tactical shooter that didn't require the twitch reflexes of a shmup, but still offered enough destruction to keep a kid entertained during a long car ride.

You command a single tank positioned within a series of walled arenas, tasked with hunting down and eliminating a set number of enemy units to advance to the next stage. The environments are composed of various tile types, most notably the destructible brick walls that you can chip away at with your cannon to create new lines of fire or escape routes. Strategy comes into play as you manage different enemy types; some tanks are fast but fragile, while others are slow, armored behemoths that require multiple hits to neutralised.

Technically, Final Combat suffers from the same "phantom" ghosting effect that plagues almost every action-oriented game on the Supervision. Because your tank and the enemy projectiles move constantly across the screen, the high-persistence LCD creates a significant trail of blur. When the screen gets crowded with multiple enemies and flying shells, the action can transform into a confusing smudge of gray. However, the developers clearly understood this limitation, as the movement is relatively slow and deliberate compared to the fast-paced arcade games of the time.

The presentation is minimalist even for 1992. You get a basic title screen, functional sprites, and a sound palette consisting of crunchy explosion noises and a repetitive 8-bit loop. While it lacks the level editor or the cooperative play that made its inspirations famous, Final Combat remains a perfectly competent, if uninspired, piece of software. It’s a game of patience and positioning that provided a functional arcade experience for the budget-conscious gamer.