Like Dragon’s Lair before it, Operation Wolf is an arcade conversion which succeeded commercially despite losing the central gimmick of the original. In this case the gimmick was not high-quality cartoon animation, but a big mounted gun which players pointed at the arcade machine’s screen to quickly be able to shoot where they liked. As an electronic shooting gallery, the gun was rather the thing.
Technically there was a similarly functioning light gun peripheral released for the Spectrum, but most players across that and various other home computer formats would have been doing without. Even that gun was a puny thing in comparison to the one mounted to the arcade cabinet, anyway. So Operation Wolf becomes a machine gun simulator with the machine gun removed. Less this crucial bit of equipment, players still get a crosshair on screen, but have to use a keyboard or joystick to move it around. Which is a poor substitute.
The story is that you are Lone Wolf (yes, games glamourising a lone wolf with a gun shooting people, what could go wrong there), deep in enemy territory and once again single-handedly taking on a whole army. To eventually save some hostages from a concentration camp, which maybe goes even further than Platoon in the ‘your silly action game is writing serious historical reference cheques it can’t cash’ stakes.
Unlike the other one-man-and-his-gun games we’ve seen, this time the enemies are facing out from the screen and shooting directly at you, the player. The screen scrolls across unprompted, leaving you as a passenger free to concentrate on controlling the crosshairs that is your representation in the world. You exist to shoot. That’s the only way to react to the waves of enemies popping up. And the helicopters and big looming figures looking directly out from the screen do provide a certain sharp instinctive reaction that differs from threats to a mere figure representing you on screen. Even when the big looming figures are rendered in Spectrum monochrome. Shooting plus a first person view is a powerful enough idea that we are going to see it again and again in this project.
We’re not going to see much of it in this form, though. Light-gun shooting galleries will continue to be an arcade fixture, often building on aspects in Operation Wolf like having to avoid shooting the hostages rather than blindly gunning down everything on sight. Occasionally they will get home conversions, but never as successfully as Operation Wolf’s months-long run at #1.
Taken out of the powerful influence of novelty, the limitations imposed without the physical gun to point back at the screen are readily apparent. It still gives a decent test of reactions, and of strategy in what to shoot first, but that strategy has to be heavily cross-referenced with cursor placement strategy. The difficulty of moving from one side of the screen to another is an extra distancing step which drags on the whole experience. As a lasting home experience, it’s a near miss, but it’s a sighting shot for bigger things to come.
