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Review: IncomingReviewed By: Bill Stiteler Review Date: January 12, 2003
To complete this analogy, Survivor: the Interactive Game would be "Crunchy Frog." Taking its plot from every movie that's come out during summer vacation, Incoming is set in the near future, when an alien invasion has begun on earth. It's a very reasonable invasion, as the E.T.s are generously only attacking areas which are well defended by the earth's military. That means you. Taking command of various pieces of military and alien hardware, you attempt to fight back the ravaging hordes before they...do something. God only knows what these guys want, but the point is that they're not based on any identifiable earth culture, so it's okay to blast them out of the sky.
The good thing is that the controls are all simple to master, once you learn what they are. This isn't a flight simulator, after all, it's a game. Another great plus is that a lot of your weapons are "smart." The helicopter is perhaps the most difficult to coordinate, since you're working it in three dimensions, but if an enemy ship comes into your field of view, your Gatling gun will automatically track it. The stationary turret also features a missile attack which you can fire-and-forget as you spin around to see from where the next sortie is approaching.
Playing through Incoming on the normal level, I was able to get through the game without dying on too many levels. And, as part of the MacPlay value series (targeted towards casual gamers and older games), that's about right. It harkens back to those great days of yore when arcade machines existed to serve and entertain us, before they became self-aware and enslaved all of humanity to their wilÑTHIS REVIEW TERMINATED BY ORDER OF NEVERWINTER NIGHTS, HIGH PRIEST TO THE GREAT GRAND THEFT AUTO. ALL PRAISE TO GTA! RESUME YOUR MENIAL TASK, HU-MAN!
 Coming soon the Applelinks Store [an error occurred while processing this directive]
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Games are like meals. Some, like Civilization, are feasts, multi-course
meals that require a great deal of time to work through and enjoy.
Quake and Unreal are meat-n-potatoes, deeply satisfying, and what you
expect. And every once in a while, you come across an unexpected, but
thoroughly enjoyable trifle like Incoming.
Incoming is 65 levels of great fun in arcade action, once you learn how to play the darn thing, that is. Usually when learning a game, I follow the "sink or swim" method. I skim the manual, play any tutorial levels it gives me, but generally I feel the best way to figure out a game is to simply play it. That doesn't work here, because each of Incoming's vehicles has a different set of controls. You begin in a turret, defending a listening post, or perhaps an AM radio station that the aliens don't care for, preventing them from bombing it back to the stone age. From there you enter a gunship 'chopper, and you have to switch to controls which allow you to move forward while also keeping track of your altitude. Then, you're in a tank, and yet a different set of controls, before you capture an alien fighter which can only move forward, and yet another set of commands.
The graphics quality of Incoming is crude, but functional, reminiscent of the video quality of the games the last time I was in an arcade (hint: you could play for a quarter). You can easily recognize all the real-world aircraft for what they are, and the aliens are vaguely reminiscent of the "V" series. As an arcade game in which things blow up as quickly as possible, though, Incoming doesn't need a lot of detail...except in the explosions, which look great as ruined ships plummet to the ground. To put it another way, Incoming looks Good Enough.