Tiger Road is a single-player hack-and-slash platform/action game, released into arcades by Capcom in 1987. It pre-dates Sega‘s Golden Axe by two years, but is very similar in terms of gameplay.

You play as Lee Wong, the master of ‘The Tiger Technique of Oh-Lin‘, on a mission to rescue some children who have been kidnapped by warriors of The Dragon God Ryuken. You must fight your way through five scrolling stages, defeat Ryuken, and free the children.

On the way you must also pass through a number of training areas, where you can retrieve scrolls, power boosters, weapon upgrades, and finally the ‘Double-Headed Tiger Fighting Technique‘, which is required to beat Ryuken.

Lee Wong is agile and can jump and make attacks from the air. He can also make higher jumps to upper platforms if you push up and press jump together. He can’t seem to drop down to a lower platform in the same way, though. He has a health bar, which – when depleted – loses one of the three lives you start with. Smashing jars or gift boxes reveals power-ups, new weapons and health replenishments. There are a variety of weapons to collect and Lee Wong must use these to his advantage.

The action in Tiger Road is relentless and, at times, extremely difficult. Multiple enemies attack simultaneously during the exterior levels, and the interior connection levels have some really tricky hazards and traps to avoid. As if that wasn’t enough there’s also a very tight timer, and you have to reach the door to the next area before it counts down. At the end of each stage is a boss battle, and there are also occasional sub-boss battles before those. These require good hit and jump timings to beat. You need to face bosses with as much of your health remaining as possible, which is a tough ask.

Occasionally there are also stages where Lee Wong wears some kind of magic coat that makes him fly. These parts are usually vertically-scrolling and enemies rain on you from above. The gameplay in Tiger Road at least tries to be more than just a side-scrolling chop ’em up, although these vertical levels are even more difficult than the horizontal ones.

The graphics in Tiger Road are typical Capcom of the time: beautiful and detailed, with excellent animation. The music and sound effects are good too. Tiger Road is nicely presented – it’s just a pity it’s so ridiculously hard! The countdown timer is especially vicious. I lost count of the number of times I lost lives because it ran down just as I was approaching a door…

There’s no multiplayer mode in Tiger Road and the game would’ve probably benefitted from one (as the Golden Axe series does). Instead, players have to take it in turns to control Lee Wong.

Tiger Road is a fun – but extremely challenging – game to play, and isn’t among Capcom‘s better-known games. Probably because it’s so unforgiving. A series of conversions were made to home computers in 1989, and the game was also successfully re-made for the PC Engine in 1990.

More: Tiger Road on Wikipedia