In Fire & Forget II, Titus took the core concept of their Crazy Cars series, bolted a set of wings and a missile launcher onto a futuristic convertible, and tasked you with stopping a terrorist convoy armed with a nuclear weapon.

Driving at high speed while dodging suicide bombers

At the start of 1990, Titus France SA faced a design problem: straight pseudo-3D racing was getting stale, but players still wanted the rush of road-based speed. Their answer was Fire & Forget II (also known as Fire & Forget II: The Death Convoy), a game that pushes your armed vehicle, the Thunder Master II, down five target-filled levels to stop an attack named "Life Thirsty" before terrorists nuke the city of Megapolis.

You view the action from a behind-the-car perspective as the tarmac ribbons forward. The controls are immediately unforgiving. Your car auto-centers on the road, meaning you spend your time wrestling against continuous enemy spawns rather than taking standard racing lines. Armed motorcycles, heavily armored jeeps, and low-flying bomber aircraft constantly swarm your position, while roadside cannons pick away at your shields.

Taking flight in Fire & Forget II changes the rules

The main gimmick here is that your vehicle isn't confined to the asphalt. As you drive, your energy meter builds up, allowing you to transform into a flying craft with the press of a button. Taking to the air changes the game completely, letting you bypass ground obstacles and engage flying bosses directly, but it introduces a brutal double resource system that leads to frequent game overs.

Success requires strict resource management while racing against a ruthless countdown timer. You have to monitor two distinct fuel supplies simultaneously:

• Blue fuel tanks replenish your standard driving engine and keep your speed up.
• Red kerosene tanks replenish your flying power so you don't plummet into hazards.
• Gray cans restock your limited missile ammunition for heavy targets.

If you miss a set of red cans before a long gap or run out of missiles right when a robotic walker or lead convoy boss appears, your run is essentially over. The sheer difficulty on PC made the controls notoriously hard to master, earning it a reputation among players as a brutal, punishing grind.

The fake arcade cabinet that tricked the press

The history behind how Titus marketed this racing and driving shooter is as wild as the gameplay. Back in late 1990, Titus built a fake arcade cabinet and displayed it at a French Amstrad exhibition to generate hype. The cabinet was completely non-playable, but Titus aggressively advertised the game as a home port of a hit arcade hit that never actually existed, a detail graphic artist Laurent Cluzel later confirmed.

That stunt left a funny leftover in the console builds, which still feature a completely useless "Insert Coins" prompt on the title screen. On PC, the 1990 release of the Fire & Forget II MS-DOS game relied heavily on hardware tricks, using smooth parallax scrolling and sprite scaling to run at high speed. For audio, standard PC speaker bleeps could be upgraded if you had AdLib sound hardware installed, while visual output supported everything from Hercules and CGA to EGA and VGA modes.

Does the Thunder Master II still deliver today?

Taken as an action shooter, the game is a mixed bag. The visuals and sound emulation hold up surprisingly well, but the decision to make the car automatically snap back to the dead center of the road robs the steering of any real nuance. Once you realize you are playing a track shooter with strict resource pick-ups rather than a true driving game, the frustration shifts from the physics to the unrelenting spawn rates.

It shows how French developers were leaning hard into sprite-scaling tricks on PC hardware. If you enjoy punishing arcade setups like Out Run mixed with heavy artillery, try it out just to experience its ridiculous flying mechanics.

You can play Fire & Forget II online free in your browser right now, with no setup required. Jump straight into the driver's seat, keep your eyes on that kerosene gauge, and see if you can take down the death convoy before your fuel runs completely dry.