Looks like the World War II inspired Capcom's game designers to a saga of shooting videogames, taking place in earth/sea/air. The first (poor) chapter was called 1942, then came 1943: The Battle of Midway (which had a great gameplay), then in 1990 it's time for this one: 1941: Counter Attack. 19xx and 1944 will be released a few years later.

1941 is a classic vertically shoot'em up videogame, featuring a cool 2-players cooperative/simultaneous mode. Each player operates an airplane, and has to move across six stages until he'll finally fight the final boss. Our airplanes are well-armed by automatic guns, which power can be upgraded by collecting shiny weapons-shaped icons, left on the screen by killed enemy airplanes. Every time you'll meet a storm of red planes, you'd better kill'em all in order to make the icon appear.

Each weapon works for a certain amount of time - you can watch at the weapon's name and left time on the bottom part of the screen. When time is over, our plane will use the standard automatic gun again. We can increase the weapons time by collecting more icons like the ones of the current weapon.

There's also another kind of weapon, which we can activate by pressing and holding the fire button: there's an energy gauge which shows the status of the "super-shot". You can release the fire button even if the gauge is not fulfilled, causing the shot not to be that powerful... but if you'll be patient and fill it at 100%, you'll probably see your enemy explode in a while!

Last but not least, you'll also have the chance to make your plane perform a sort of "somersault" or launching a "smart bomb", which will make us relax for a while - most of the times actually! But beware: those features waste an energy unit. We have 4 units at first (shown at the bottom part of the screen), and we'll loose one whenever plane is hit and each time we'll drop a bomb. When our craft is low of energy, a beeping sound will activate and then... one more hit and the plane will go down in flames.

We can restore part of the energy by picking a POW icon, which we can get after destroying certain red planes storms. That's worth an energy unit, so take the chance to get as many as you find - but it's worth 50.000 points if your energy is already at the maximum! Also, we can increase the maximum energy by one slot, by getting an additional POW item - must be true aces to get that!

The Capcom icon (a red circle having a white razor-cross inside) fully restores energy, but it will be worth 100.000 points in case we're not in need of energy.

Extra weapons, which you collect during the game, are a better gun than the standard one, a laser beam, and missiles. We can also grab a red shiny airplane icon which will bring us two extra small airplanes, which will locate our craft's side and power-up our shoots. Those planes can be hit a few times and then explode, but we may also want to throw them in "kamikaze" style, in order to blast larger enemy crafts.

From stage 2 onwards, we'll also find red rolling planes icons: our aircraft will be powered by a tail made of two small planes, which will follow our moves: gun will be powered three times, and we'll easily fill almost all of the screen area with our shoots!

Our flight begins at a 20.000 ft. height, in an unidentified place in the Northern Atlantic Ocean. We'll fly over lots of different landscapes: hills, cities, towns, and sea.

Battle starts on the Ocean, where we'll meet the very first enemies in the shape of various airplanes, werships and submarines. Next we'll fight enemies which move on the land such as tanks, missile launchers, earth-to-air rocket launchers, and even some futuristic weapons as death rays, fantastic helicopters, giant space crafts having incredibly powerful guns and tons of armors, and so on... At the end of each stage, we'll have to beat the final boss and secure the area. Six levels, six bosses - what an entertainment!

First boss is a huge aircraft named Leviathan. It has an average fire power and smashing it out it's quite easy. In phase two the Bismark warship will shoot at our craft, while storms of enemy planes will make our hunt even harder! In level three we'll fight an incredible sort of space ship, named V3Rochet: it's also much resistant to our shots. Then it's time for Krote: it's a kind of tank having lots of missile launchers and platforms where helicopters take off against our airplane! Level five, it's time for another Leviathan - much more powerful than the Mark I. Lastly we'll have the final battle against Gotha,  a black plane having shape of a manta ray... it's really really hard to crush it! As we destroy it, world lives in peace blah blah blah... while our airplane flies happy towards the sunset.

After completing each stage, all lovers of statistics will be happy to see percentages of killed/missed enemies etc, and the military degree we just reached.