Knee deep in alien guts...
- A pioneer spaceship has suddenly vanished.
An investigation uncovered the wrecked ship.
Two men have been sent inside the ship to investigate the cause...
SAR: Search and Rescue is a 1989 Run-and-Gun action game created by SNK, maker of popular RNG arcade games... and their goriest title to date.
Featuring a plot "borrowed" (ahem) from Aliens, in the distant future a colonial ship lose all contact with headquarters before it's located on the surface of a neighboring alien planet, having crashed after some unspecified incident. Two soldiers from the elite SAR: Search and Rescue force are dispatched to investigate, only to discover the ship's crew to be either dead or assimilated by an alien mutant virus, with assorted alien monsters and the ship's malfunctioning robotic security rampaging through it's interiors.
SAR: Search and Rescue is available in SNK 40th Anniversary Collection released in 2018.
Nobody knows the facts... what has happened?
- Airborne Mook: Robots on hovering boosters, floating robot limbs, some Attack Drone-type enemies. Many of them even flies out from underneath pits to attack you.
- Air-Dashing: You can pull this off while jumping, allowing you to dash in a straight line. It comes in real handy during the level where half it's floors are collapsing into killer drops, where you can just air-dash to the nearest uncollapsible platform while your enemies get thrown to their deaths.
- Alien Blood: Owing to the mutations, several of the once-human mooks will explode in puddles of magenta, yellow, orange, purple, and assorted colours once shot into chunks,
- Back-to-Back Badasses: On two-player mode, this is a good way to fend off mutant monsters coming from both sides of the screen, something that happens very frequently during the game.
- Blob Monster: Some of the infected monsters manifest as gigantic green sludge-like blobs with eyes, who travels as sentient puddles before assuming a solid form to attack. Their puddle forms can't be killed but are otherwise harmless, and shooting them enough as the latter will dissolve them.
- Bloodier and Gorier: This is easily the goriest SNK arcade title release back in the day, with tons and tons of graphic overkills peppered throughout, the first few mutant enemies literally exploding into a pile of guts immediately telling players this is nothing like Cabal or Ikari Warriors.
- Body Horror:
- Infected humans in late stages lose their skins, have their bones penetrating their flesh, and are driven by the agony to attack you on sight. Some of them can even continue attacking without their lower bodies.
- The alien mutant Final Boss, which you fight in a puddle of blood (or a red liquid resembling blood). Killing him melts his body into chunks into the blood pool... before he comes back a second time, the pool re-fusing and connecting his parts back.
- Bottomless Pits: That will kill you instantly. There are also areas where the floors will literally crumble below you, necessitating you to make a run to the nearest uncollapsible surface. Enemies caught in these pitfalls will be eliminated as well.
- Degraded Boss: The second boss, the Chonma-G robot tank isn't really strong when first fought, but later comes back in large numbers as a mook-level enemy.
- Downer Ending: The only good thing in the ending is that the heroes came back alive. Despite their effort, there were no survivors to be rescued in the ship and their report about alien creatures doesn't become public because the superiors feared the news would impede their colonization. The credits end with an ominous message that even if History Repeats, it still won't be reported.
- Elevator Action Sequence: One of the stages is an exposed elevator platform that descends down a deep shaft, and along the way mooks (spider-like mutant critters and the half-mutants whose bodies end at their waists_ will crawl from the edges to attack. The whole stage have you fending them off until the elevator touches the bottom.
- Gorn: The onscreen violence of the game can be really, really over-the-top, and rather frequently too. But that makes it even more awesome.
- Half the Man He Used to Be:
- One of the mutant variety (which bleeds purple) is a former human without his lower half and his spine exposed, where he'll crawl at you to attack.
- The Xeno-like enemies will lose their upper bodies if hit by explosive attacks or shot at point-blank range. Their legs will just walk around a bit before staggering over.
- Helping Hands: The robotic variant appears as a recurring enemy, being mechanical wrists propelled by a single jet thruster at it's stump. They attack by punching or grabbing you but otherwise doesn't have any long-range projectile abilities.
- Ludicrous Gibs: Expect enemies to fall apart into bloodied chunks with splatters of their blood and guts all over the place with each onscreen kill. And then some more. Heck, there are even larger enemies who doesn't die in a single hit, leaving behind a trail of broken flesh behind everywhere they walk.
- Meat Moss: Into the heart of the doomed colony ship, you'll discover how bad the mutation outbreak is with the walls and floors coated in assorted flesh and organs.
- Mecha-Mooks: Owing to the station malfunctioning, the robot units have gone haywire and you'll be fighting plenty of mechanical enemies throughout.
- Mini Mook: The first boss, Chagaman (a mutation-fused tank on legs) have a smaller form looking like a scaled down version of it's boss form as a recurring enemy.
- Non-Indicative Name: Despite the title, you don't really get to rescue anyone. Because by the time you reach the downed colonial ship, everyone onboard is either dead or assimilated.
- Our Zombies Are Different: The ex-human mooks are victims of the mutation outbreak, which effectively turns them into mindless, zombie-like drones driven by their instincts to destroy and devour everything in sight.
- Overly-Long Tongue: While the Xeno-like enemies has Nested Mouths like their inspiration, some of them however can extend their tongues for several meters, chewing you from a distance away.
- Robotic Undead: Several of the robotic enemies appears to be undead, with their wirings and internal circuits exposed due to wear and tear, but will continue pressing on to attack.
- Scenery Gorn: The aftermath of the infection isn't pretty. There's wreckage, broken machinery and ruined structures all over the place, as well as plenty of bloodied corpses belonging to lucky colonists who escaped mutation.
- Segmented Serpent: Bio-Snake, a gigantic two-headed snake monster and the second-to-last boss is depicted as multiple segmented orbs.
- Sequential Boss: The alien mutant Final Boss needs to be fought twice. The first time you kill it only results in the monster's body getting stitched together by the mutation and gaining a grotesque, deformed second form.
- Space Marine: You play as one (or two) investigating an alien outbreak.
- Stationary Boss: The Final Boss, the most powerful mutant abomination, owing to it's body being confined to a single blood pool.
- Unrealistic Black Hole: One power-up instantly opens up a black hole that sucks in all mooks within a close proximity (but not the player or players) and banishes them into another dimension, never to be seen again. It works best on lowest-level enemies, while stronger mooks need to suffer some damage first before they're dragged in. And NO, sadly bosses are too powerful to be affected by it.
- Was Once a Man: The humanoid mutant mooks used to be colonialists from the crashed ship, but their humanity have been wiped out by the mutation virus.
- Weak Turret Gun: Automated turrets in the colony ship will shoot at you, but they're not very durable.
- Xenomorph Xerox: Some of the non-human enemies resemble the Xenos from the Alien movies (granted, the premise of a colony ship getting assimilated by extraterrestrial life is practically lifted from Aliens) with their smooth, elongated heads, their overly-long limbs for crawling around, and having a Nested Mouth for attacking. Heck, you even see some of them being birthed onscreen by bursting out of corpses (much like the chestburster, though in this case they're Born as an Adult rather than starting in infancy).
- Zerg Rush: The ex-human colonists will try swarming you in increasingly large numbers as the game goes on.
- Headquarters has destroyed the investigators' report of the wrecked ship knowing it will shock the pioneers of the planet.
The ship vanished to the bottom of the ravine with the facts.
Even if it happened again, it will never be reported.
