Uploaded September 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Game Info
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Developer: Dinamic
Publisher: Dinamic
Year of Release: 1989

Game Review & Impressions
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After the War is one of those games I had for the Amiga which I had something of a soft spot for back then. The gameplay is distinctly average, but it features some truly excellent pixel art and animation for the time; the more I look at it, the more impressed I am. I recorded a longplay of the Amiga version several years back, but having had to endure the pain that is the C64 port, I simply fancied revisiting this edition of the game again and create a new play-through in higher fidelity.

I took the time to peruse the game manual to learn about the plot for the game. Jonathan "Jungle" Rogers must brave the horrors of a post-nuclear Manhattan, searching for the headquarters of Professor McJerin in a bid to escape the horrors of an irradiated Earth by launching in to space. You don't ever encounter the professor, or see yourself blast off into space for that matter, but it's excuse enough to beat up/shoot a load of bad guys with a truly colossal machine gun.

As with most of Dinamic's games, After the War is divided into two distinct sections. The first part of the game is set above ground in the crumbling ruins of downtown Manhattan, where "Jungle" Rogers must duff up mohawk-sporting punks, corrupt cops, emaciated skater dudes, as well as deal with the rabid mutts which infest the streets. In their infinite wisdom, Dinamic decided to spread the controls across joystick AND keyboard, requiring the player sit in front of the Amiga to be able to access all the controls. It's a problem throughout the game, persisting into the second part, which is undoubtedly the trickier of the two sections.

Set under the streets of Manhattan, Rogers must cut a swathe through giant rats and mutated humans hiding in the abandoned tube tunnels, searching for an entrance to McJerin's secret base. The key to success here is learning when and where bad guys will spawn, bringing a storm of hot lead to bear on where you know they'll spawn. You'll often have to deal with multiple targets at once, and as most of them are complete bullet sponges, it's difficult to avoid taking damage. Inside the base itself, shotgun-wielding guards and automated sentry guns will make short work of Rogers if you're not careful, and the countdown timer will tick away all too quickly, so you should be on the look out for timer power-ups to top it up.

The final boss of the game is, perhaps unsurprisingly, an exceedingly cheap war of attrition against a massive tank with multiple cannons. The cannons track your location no matter where you are on screen, so the only real strategy available to you is hope you have enough spare lives in reserve to soak up the damage and destroy the guns before they destroy you. There's little point trying to avoid the shells being fired at you, so you best get really good at clearing the earlier sections without losing lives or wasting too much time. Your reward for beating the game is a brief page of text advertising Dinamic's next game, which is another kick in the teeth.

So the game is distinctly mediocre, but as I noted at the start of this review, I just love the game's aesthetic. The graphics are highly detailed and look fantastic, so it's a shame that the developers forgot to adjust the colour palette values when the ported this from the Atari ST to the Amiga. Despite using the same RGB format between the two systems, the Amiga interpretation of these values results in colours only half as bright as the ST counterpart. It's an issue that affected a number of games where the ST was effectively the lead platform, but the developers simply failed to fix this issue before the Amiga port shipped, with the end result looking really dark. WinUAE has an in-built fix for games with this dark palette issue, but anyone playing this back in the day either had to squint really hard, or crank up the contrast on the TV to rectify the problem.

After the War is by no means a classic, but I still think it has a certain charm. If you're sufficiently deft of finger to deal with the clunky control scheme, you might just have some fun with it.

Chapters
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00:00 Part 1 - Manhattan Streets
18:47 Part 2 - Manhattan Underground