Play Air Cars Online

Summary

AirCars drops you into a three‑dimensional, first‑person hovercraft cockpit on the Atari Jaguar, where you can toggle between several camera angles while blasting foes with a shotgun, machine gun, cannons, missiles, mines and even a smoke screen. The HUD is packed with a radar map, speed and armor readouts, and a target direction indicator, while power‑ups appear throughout the 32 missions (28 on Earth, 4 on Mars) and you never run out of continues. Two‑player co‑op runs over JagLink, and the game was the first to support up to eight competitors in a LAN deathmatch via the CatBox peripheral, a rare network feature for the console. MidNite Entertainment Group, an early third‑party Jaguar studio, originally announced the title as Car Wars in 1994; after several delays and a brief cancellation, ICD released a tiny run of 200 copies in June 1997, later followed by reproduction runs in 2010 and 2016. Critics panned the primitive graphics, missing music and clunky controls, but the multiplayer mode earned a nod, and today AirCars is a coveted collector’s item.

Storyline

Air Cars drops you into a bleak, post‑apocalyptic world after a nuclear holocaust. The shadowy group E.B.N.E.R.S. was founded by former nuclear scientists who claim they want humanity to live in peace and to restructure society so hostility can never arise again, though many see the plan as unrealistic and radical.

Government agents have infiltrated the organization and uncovered its development of force fields, teleportation devices and heavily‑armored vehicles known as aircars, which E.B.N.E.R.S. intends to use to seize control of the remaining survivors. As the player you pilot a prototype aircar that is teleported into an E.B.N.E.R.S. base, tasked with eliminating each key target before escaping through a teleport gate to the next zone. In levels marked with a “G”, a boss awaits after the final target, adding an extra showdown before you can move on.