Tempest Of Violence Is Pure Distilled Batshittery (And I Love It)

In the eponymous level “Storm of Violence”, you must kill more than 900 enemies before the time runs out. Screenshot: Anachronia / Kotaku

I’ve never owned an Amiga, but I’m obsessed with Enemy: Tempest Of Violence, an Amiga game developed in Switzerland released in 1997. Buckle up, it’s about to be a ride.

My partner and I have a ritual where we watch Twitch on the weekends before bed. My partner is a staunch old man (even though he’s only 34) and has no desire to watch popular streamers or games. He’ll only watch streamers on the Retro channel, the Twitch channel dedicated to games as old as us. There we found Ara45, an Australian streamer with a penchant for playing the most obscure dark games. One weekend we watched Macaw45 play an ancient game in which a lone security guard armed with a simple pistol mowed down an army of aliens while leading his human allies to safety. This game was Enemy: Tempest Of Violence, and every weekend for the past month my partner and I religiously watched Macaw45 make their way through this game and it was fucking fascinating.

I will do my best to explain Enemy: Tempest of Violence and I will fail. Simple words cannot fully express its awesomeness but I will try anyway.

Enemy: Tempest of Violence is an action-puzzle game in which you play as a handful of characters trapped on three huge alien ships. There are 34 time-limited levels, each with their own objective of trying to survive and outsmart your alien opponents. Sometimes you will be responsible for guiding civilians from one part of the ship to another, managing them so that they do not die of traps or alien enemies. There are also times when your goal will be to complete a task like defending a room, negotiating with aliens, or destroying their eggs. Other times you will be given a huge pistol, 1000 enemies, and the simple imperative to survive.

Your human allies are dumb and will frequently enter bullets as pictured here.

The different configurations of time and resources make each level a puzzle to solve, and this is where the subtle genius of Enemy lies. Watching Macaw trial and error through them made Enemy a captivating watch. The game gives general clues as to what to do before each mission, but beyond that, Macaw was on his own. Watching his reactions as he worked his way through the puzzles and story was just as entertaining as the action taking place on the screen.

During the Egg Mission, since you are given so little ammo, there were situations where Macaw used all of his bullets to shoot the eggs and then had nothing left to kill the aliens and vice versa. To get by, Macaw had to figure out how to make every bullet count. It meant shooting eggs hanging from the ceiling to fall and smash eggs on the floor, or dropping a grenade through a grid in the floor to smash eggs he couldn’t reach.

During the final mission, Macaw – trapped on the last remaining ship – had to find a way through a room filled with aliens who could, at any moment, blow him and his alien ally Fix to pieces. Through heartbreaking trial and error, Macaw determined he needed to empty one of his most powerful guns of its ammo, leaving it with only a pistol. He then had to go through the following rooms full of enemies, their weapons aimed at him, until he reached the alien queen whom he then had to shoot, kill and quickly pick up the scepter she dropped. before the aliens shoot him and fix it. to death.

The other missions weren’t that complex. During the self-titled “Storm of Violence” level, Macaw and his 400 allies fought their way through an attack of 929 enemies before time ran out. The comedic number of enemies filling the screen to be nothing but bloody traces on the wall and rotting bodies on the floor was pretty darn entertaining.

The attraction of the enemy also lies in its history. There’s no dialogue or cutscene, so the story is delivered only through long scribbles of text that reads like a 1950s pulp novel.

The text is littered with awkward sentences and misspellings, but the mistakes only add to Enemy’s charm. What started out as mere “failed scientists fighting bloodthirsty aliens” has taken so many wild turns. Throughout the game, you ally with a number of alien NPCs with names like Bumbum (so named for the dual pistols he uses) and Bigboss. You are committing war crimes by destroying alien eggs. One of the three ships is destroyed. The other disappears with all his human crew. Hackers present themselves one way or another. One of your alien allies tragically dies offscreen (RIP Foxy). Finally, at the end of the game, through a comedy of errors that defy description, the last human survivor has become the alien queen.

Macaw finished the game last night, and I’m so glad I got to see his final moments. The last handful of missions – from the last 300 Spartans-esque clash against an army of 900 aliens to the absolutely wacky Chronicles Of Riddick style ending “You Keep What You Kill” – has been such a blast to watch live that I don’t regret giving up the ritual of watching Ara’s streams with my partner to watch for myself. I enthusiastically told him the highlights, but he’s disappointed that he missed it. (Our weekday schedules are so different that we only watch the streams together on the weekends.) He won’t be disappointed for long; Enemy: Tempest of Violence has a sequel, and Macaw’s has said he plans to play it in the future. I look forward.