Ludography
TerraFire cover

1997 · Arcade · Multidirectional shooter

TerraFire

TerraFire is an award-winning arcade game featuring 3D-rendered graphics, realistic gravitational physics and 360 degree parallax scrolling.

Released
1997
Platforms
MS-DOSWindows
Genres
ArcadeMultidirectional shooterShooter
Developers
—
Publishers
—
Modes
Single-player
Perspective
Side view
Themes
ActionScience fiction
Country
United Kingdom

About

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.

Keywords

  • gravity
  • physics
  • space

Media

TerraFire screenshot 1

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

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. ]". 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 by platformdates and regions as published

PlatformReleasedRegions
MS-DOS1 October 1997Worldwide
Windows23 March 2000Worldwide

Games like this

Collections1 collection

Description adapted from its source, CC BY-SA 4.0.