You'll feel like the character sinking in the submarine after playing this awful game.
You are trying to escape a sinking nuclear submarine by collecting the orange and white hatch keys to go in a elevator to go up a floor before you die from drowning in a flooded floor while dodging torpedoes and barriers. Every ten seconds the lowest floor will be flooded. Once you reach the top you win the game. There are two difficulties: the easiest has you escape five floors with 49 seconds and the harder difficulty has you escape ten floors with 99 seconds.
The title screen doesn't have the title of the game, only the name of the developer. Even ET managed to get this right. Even though the title screen doesn't have the title, it looks nice compared to the submarine levels.
The graphics are below average for the system. Your character doesn't animate when he moves and the torpedoes are the character sprite recolored red without feet. The hatch keys are also horizontal lines instead of resembling anything like a key. The second hatch key is also colored red when in the manual it says it's colored white.
The controls are terrible. The game is very finicky with jumping which means you sometimes jump straight up instead of moving which can cause you to get hit by a torpedo. It also makes it difficult to jump between two barriers. The whole game can be completed in less than 30 minutes and that's including having practice with the game.
The torpedoes behave like blade traps in the Zelda games and not like real torpedoes. They move left and right inside the submarine and while there's no water present. They don't even explode when you touch one. When you get hit by a torpedo, you're temporarily stunned for a few seconds, wasting precious time. It's even possible to get hit by the same torpedo the moment you are able to move again which makes it practically impossible to escape the submarine in time. The barriers on the other hand, are a pain in the neck to jump over despite being stationary because if one pixel from your character touches one, then you will end up moving to the side of the barrier you attempted to jump over. In the harder difficulty, there are barriers adjacent to each other and there's very little space in between for you to jump over each one.
The ending doesn't make sense. Your character is jumping while on top of the sinking submarine as if he's away from danger, but there's nobody around to rescue him. The manual doesn't even state his fate after reaching the top.
This game is the so-called poster child for the '83 North American video game crash. The other game, ET, I don't like that game, but it is probably okay to play. This game, Airlock, I don't like this game, but it is NOT okay to play. If you like skydiving blind without a parachute, this is your new favorite game!