ESWAT: Cyber Police

The Good
Crime is getting out of control on the streets of Liberty City; with no law and order, raping, stealing, and drug trafficking are on the rise. A division of the Liberty City PD has been set up to combat this problem, known as the Enhanced Special Weapons and Tactics (or ESWAT for short). Cops who are promoted to this division wear a cyber-suit that has advanced military hardware available to them. In order for a cop to be promoted, he needs to apprehend enough dangerous criminals to be promoted to Captain, then Assistant Chief, then Chief, then finally to ESWAT.

The objective of the game is to get through 15 locations, which include normal suburbs, car yards, Chinatown, construction sites, and a top-secret facility where you meet the leader. ESWAT is a horizontal-scrolling beat-'em-up where players go left to right, shooting criminals that get in the way and taking down the villain at the end of the level. Once having done this, players get to see how far they got to go until becoming an ESWAT member; and they get to see a rap sheet of the villain they must apprehend.

The game is faithful to the coin-op in almost every way. For instance, the attract mode features the music found in the coin-op version, and it has a catchy feel to it. The cyber-suit makes it appearance, with the various gadgets pointed out. What's amusing about it is that it also comes equipped with fried chicken and a lunch guide.

When it comes to gameplay, your character arriving at the scene is a nice touch, and so are the backgrounds and character sprites. There are bosses that you wouldn't expect to be fighting, like a tiger and a giant ape. The speech is funny, with lines like “Hey, let's party” and “Ohh. Thank you, officer!”.

The control system is easy to learn, with the joystick used to move the character left or right and jump by wiggling the joystick. You do not have to lobby grenades at enemies, so all you need to do is press the fire button to shoot bullets out of your gun or cyber-suit. While you are wearing your cyber-suit, some power-ups will float around the screen; and getting these power-ups will give you different types of ammo.

The Bad
The controls are a little dodgy. Enemies shoot at you from apartment windows, but when you attempt to shoot upwards, you end up jumping up toward them.

There is no background music during the game. I loved listening to the BGM while I was playing the coin-op version, and I just thought that the Amiga version would have it as well.

Finally, when I looked at the graphic detail between the Amiga and coin-op versions, I found that the graphics in the Amiga version look washed-out.

The Bottom Line
Fight crime on the streets and defeat the master criminal when you get to the end of the street. That's something you can do in RoboCop, but in that game you don't get awarded for it (through promotion). The Amiga version has most of the features found in the original coin-op, but with no BGM during the game and slightly washed-out graphics. What I like about this version is the speech that I mentioned above. I didn't know that you can party while fighting crime.