Ambush puts one or two players in command of soldiers advancing through a jungle, firing in all four cardinal directions, a freedom of fire uncommon for its time. Simultaneous two-player cooperation on screen, without turns, also set it apart from much of its contemporaries.
It was overshadowed by other run and guns that better defined the genre in the following years, but for anyone tracing the origin of the military board-level shooter, it's a required stop: several ideas that Contra and its successors would later polish are already there in germ form.
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