For more on After Burner Climax, check out our full After Burner Climax review. Or, for more of the best Xbox 360 games for a 7 year old, why not try our Family Game Finder
After Burner Climax is a fast paced arcade flying game that aims to turn you into the next Top Gun. Putting you at the yoke of a fighter jet before launching you head-first off an aircraft carrier, it's a blazing mix of flying, shooting, and dodging as you blast through the scrolling stages destroying anything that comes your way - before they can do the same to you.
With its origins in the arcades, After Burner Climax is actually rather difficult to begin with - having been designed to drain your lives (and therefore your money), you'll often find yourself coming up against seemingly insurmountable odds, as the screen fills with enemy planes and rockets heading right towards you. While the initial difficulty may be enough to put some younger children off, thankfully, the game does get a lot easier the more you play, as you'll unlock special "EX options". These options, which are tied to certain things you do in the game, help make things a heck of a lot easier, and are reasonably straightforward to earn. Get a game over, and you'll unlock the ability to start with extra lives; shoot down a certain number of planes with your machine gun, and you'll unlock a stronger gun. Simply by playing through the game, and failing, you'll earn all sorts of extras and assists for your plane that will, eventually, help you reach the finish.
As your plane flies through the levels on a pre-set course, allowing you to make only minor adjustments, there's a lot less to think about here than in other flight sim games, as you only have to worry about dodging the rockets/lining up your plane with your target rather than figuring out how to get somewhere. Although it starts off incredibly hard, the more you play, the more EX options you unlock, and the easier After Burner Climax will become. With the only real reading in the game being the descriptions of the EX options (and what you have to do to unlock them), if you have a budding fighter pilot in your midst - and they have enough patience to stick with it when they don't immediately succeed - this could be worth a look.
Although it's a high paced arcade game, there's nothing for parents to be concerned about here - no gore, no swearing, and the only violence comes from blowing up other planes with rockets.
Age Ratings
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
