Developed by East Technology for Taito, and first distributed into arcades in 1994, Operation Wolf 3 is – as the title suggests – the third game in the famous Operation Wolf series. It’s a lightgun shooter for one or two players, and it goes the route of using digitised graphics, which I personally think was a mistake, because the hand-drawn 2D graphics of Operation Wolf, and the sequel, Operation Thunderbolt, are much better than the dodgy visuals in this.

In Operation Wolf 3 you’re fighting against nondescript “terrorists”, dressed in ridiculous brightly-coloured clothing, and must avoid shooting innocent bystanders who walk through the various scenes shouting “help”.

Your ammo is shown at the side of the screen, and in this, when you empty a clip, the game re-loads for you. You also have a limited number of bombs that can be fired with the secondary fire button (on the actual arcade cabinet this was a pump-action trigger by the looks of it, although to be honest I’ve never played this game on real hardware).

When you’re shot by an enemy you lose a life and a skull flashes on screen. When all your lives are gone you can continue by putting more credits in. At the end of each level there’s a boss fight, where you have to whittle down its health to beat it.

There are some extra target practice sections between levels, and each scene you complete gives you an accuracy rating.

While the shooting action in Operation Wolf 3 isn’t bad, the presentation is very dated and the digitised graphics look extremely rough. The game is also a very formulaic and bland experience and it seems to me that the developers either didn’t really put their hearts into it, or Taito saw that the game wasn’t looking very good and rushed it to market without giving the devs time to polish it. Or both.

There are also some very bad translations into English throughout the game, and the scores are cut off at the top of the screen, but that could be an issue with MAME.

Operation Wolf 3 isn’t really an Operation Wolf game – it just exploits the name – and I doubt it will appeal much to players who like the original classic shooter. Operation Wolf 3 is pretty crappy and very disappointing overall, and I can’t really recommend it.

More: Operation Wolf 3 on Wikipedia