SHMUP INDEX

Running the index costs money. If you want to collaborate:

Buy me a coffee Support on Ko-fi

If you have any question, contact us.

Corrections and missing games are welcome too.

Index › 1990s › TerraFire
TerraFire cover art

TerraFire

Wishlist

ADD TO LIST

TerraFire

TerraFire is an award-winning arcade game featuring 3D-rendered graphics, realistic gravitational physics and 360 degree parallax scrolling. Blast your ship through heavily defended underground caverns, past wind tunnels, fire-walls and subterranean lakes. Recover stolen nuclear pods using your ship's tractor beam, then carry them back to the planet surface and beyond into hyperspace. TerraFire features 27 missions (including 6 hyperspace levels), spread across 5 unique worlds.

Year
1997
Developer
ORT Software
Publisher
ORT Software
Orientation
Horizontal

SCREENSHOTS

HISTORY

TerraFire is a multidirectional shooter for MS-DOS. It was originally released on October 1, 1997 as shareware with a demo limiting the player to only the first eight levels. In 2005, TerraFire was re-released as freeware.

The game is best called a shoot 'em up, but unlike most games of this genre, the player is free to move in any direction, with physics similar to the 1979 arcade game Asteroids. Bullet patterns from enemies and obstacles are also far more sparse and predictable, and there are no bosses. The full version of the game has a total of 27 levels, where every fourth level is a bonus level which is a clone of the aforementioned Asteroids. The normal levels, which scroll both horizontally and vertically and wrap horizontally, have gravity and are completed by finding a nuke and dragging it out of the top of the level.

TerraFire uses pre-rendered 3D graphics and animation.

Reception

Mikrobitti named TerraFire game of the month in their June/July 1998 issue. They called the game a Thrust clone and said the gameplay is splendid despite the game's simple appearance. ZDNet gave the game a score of five out of five and wrote: "TerraFire is a graphically pleasing, challenging arcade game in the Super R Type vein [...]". Computer Gaming World gave TerraFire the award for the best action/adventure game at ZDNet's 7th Annual Shareware Awards. They called it "a graphically pleasing, challenging arcade game". In a retrospective review, Rock Paper Shotgun called the game a "Gravitar homage with lovely parallax backgrounds and handsome faux-3D sprites".

RELEASES 2 systems

System
Platform
Year
Notes
DOS
DOS
1997
Original release
PC
Windows
2000

PHYSICAL RELEASES 1 box

TerraFire box art, DOS
DOS DOS

GAME DATA

Orientation
Horizontal

SOURCES

Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
Something wrong or missing? .

Suggest a correction