Airborne Ranger

Airborne Ranger is a tactical action game from MicroProse in which the player commands a single elite soldier dropped behind enemy lines to carry out a series of sabotage and rescue missions. It came out on the Commodore 64 in 1987 and differed from MicroProse's typical flight simulations by using a top-down view and focusing on ground action – blowing up bridges, freeing hostages, or destroying ammunition depots, with every mission taking place on a different map with a different layout of patrols.

Before a mission, the player chooses equipment from a limited number of slots, which forces a choice between explosives, binoculars, grenade launchers, or medical supplies, and this choice directly affects how the mission can be completed and which tactics the player has to forgo. The Ranger parachutes into the area and has to move carefully, since enemy patrols and towers react to noise as well as direct contact, so a quiet approach often pays off better than a frontal assault. The combination of action-paced gameplay with the need to plan equipment made the game something between a simple strategy title and arcade action, which was fairly unusual in MicroProse's catalog, since the company was known at the time mainly for cockpit-view flight and helicopter simulations.

The execution on the C64 was solid – the soldier and enemy sprites are small, but the animation of movement and shooting remains legible even in faster moments when the player has to react quickly to fire from a tower. Airborne Ranger was praised at launch precisely for this unusual combination of genres within a simulation publisher's lineup, and it is still remembered today as one of MicroProse's more original titles, one that showed the company could deliver tactically minded action, not just cockpit simulations for military-hardware enthusiasts, and it paved the way for later tactical action games seen from the perspective of a single soldier on the battlefield, where planning matters just as much as quick reflexes.

Why play: For players looking for tactically minded action instead of yet another cockpit simulation – an original combination of planning and quick reflexes from the perspective of a single soldier on the battlefield.