E-Swat Cyber Police - Arcade

A pre-runner for Crackdown? No not the Sega game... nevermind, it's a review.

Sometimes it becomes clear that a game like E-Swat - Cyber Police is using another game engine. What we basically have here is Shinobi or Rolling Thunder (likely Shinobi if it's SEGA) but with cops and robots riding the success of Robocop in the cinemas. While OCEAN may have had the license for Robocop games, it didn't stop SEGA trying to jump the bandwagon with their game, E-Swat - Cyber Police.

Generic cop vs. Skateboarder. Someone film it and cause controversy.

You play as Beatwalker McGenericCop, on the street and ready to shoot everyone and everything. You name it, it's going to get a bullet of hard justice in the face. Skateboarders? Shot. Hostages? Shot. Guy holding a knife? Shot twice. While you take your generic coppy guy out for a stroll, you have to foil three hardened asshats who just robbed a bank and took a hostage with them. One breathes fire and has a bin lid for a shield, another has a boomerang (has anyone EVER used one of these in a threatening manner?) and the last can twirl an anchor on a chain like it's a Kusarigama (look it up).

Congratulations, you're a dick in armour.

Once you've caught the three initial miscreants that can soak up more lead than onions, you're given the upgrade of a cop-lifetime. You get to become Roboc- E-Swat - Cyber Police, where you wear the most bulked out armour you've ever seen and your arm gets a machinegun wrapped around it. Now you're licensed to get shot at by the more heavily armed mobsters out there and giant gorillas (I'm not joking).

Looks like Friday Night in Hackney.

In what is a basic platform, run/gun game, you make your way from left to right and use your ammo (yes you can run out) to shoot down everybody that moves and then try to collect enough ammo to avoid having to melee your way through the game. When you get damaged as the E-Swat - Cyber Police, you also can see the physical damage to your suit just in case your ability to read a health bar is marred by the game. In some places you can leap into the background or up onto a higher platform while most of the game will be spent trying to dodge every bullet, knife, laser and flame thrown at you.

Yes, that looks... reasonable.

Yep, moving and escaping from damage is a tough one in E-Swat - Cyber Police, given you're the size of a walking tank that walks more slowly than a geriatric treading through glue, yet have the strength and agility to leap nearly 20ft into the air if you need to, you're still going to take a lot of hits and wounds from enemies that can mob you and spray firepower like it's going out of fashion. If it's not the gangsters with their rockets and flamethrowers, it's the background that can spawn gun turrets almost at will or the hugely overpowered boss fights that start interestingly and end disappointingly.

It's quite a bit one-sided at this point.

As an example in E-Swat - Cyber Police, your first big boss fight is against a guy in a similarly powered suit that you have. Beating him leads to him running off (why you can't shoot him in the back I don't know) until he's rigged a building to blow up and while it's falling and you're INSIDE that building, you have to fight his private army and escape the building, then you can arrest him. The second main guy to take down sends a tiger, a gorilla (See, I wasn't joking) and a Monster Truck at you and then later bosses are just generic robots/tanks that really lack the almost-creative flare of the original set of bosses.

I didn't sign up for this!

While the levels don't exactly grab the imagination, there's some different layouts and settings the game puts you in with no real cohesion between them in E-Swat - Cyber Police. You're at the docks for one fight, then a football stadium or similar, then a city street, industrial site, docks again until the final few levels that take place in one huge hidden establishment. Otherwise it's the grab-a-large-dice-time-and-roll-out-the-randomly-assigned-level-layout-for-the-next-one, style of level sequence.

Time to bring the house down.

All in all, E-Swat - Cyber Police isn't really a bad game but it is a game that's been done before and done better by the likes of Shinobi and even Rolling Thunder (maybe not so much on Rolling Thunder, but definitely and more memorably with Shinobi) it's not terrible, but it's not great either, an unhappy midground that will have it over looked by games that sit on the more extreme ends of the see-saw.

Sim City (SNES)

Because real ones are a pain in the arse.

It's possibly an odd choice of game, though games akin to have taken off with huge support and a large following. The idea that you get to control an environment of your choosing, shape it, mold it and breathe life into it before slapping a shopping centre in the middle and screwing up the landscape with an industrial site, is just one of the many things you can do in Sim City on the Super Nintendo.

In a short while you can go from serenity to chaos.

The idea is the same as one would find on the PC and other versions. You're given a blank slate of land, a budget depending upon the difficulty and told to go and start a town. First you'll need power, but which type to you? Pollution heavy coal that doesn't power as many buildings, or more powerful nuclear power that runs the risk of meltdown and making your town uninhabitable for many, many years? Do you build up the industrial centres with houses too to make them cheap and affordable, but also encourage crime? Or do you build them way away from everything and have only the super rich afford it? Which means very few will come in.

"Paved paradise, put up a parking lot..."

There's many choices like this in Sim City and that's before we even scratch the surface to see the maps and reports one can find. Crime, tax, people's voice, fire control, roads and transportation; you can control all the taxes and where they're spent but not enough money will either leave roads and rail crumbling or the police and fire unable to do their jobs. You could raise taxes, but few will stay around for that, or lower them for more people but gaining less from them. It's a tightrope of economic balance and you'll have to do it.

Might as well, it's going to be full of shit anyway.

You're not alone, there's the Doc that assists by telling you the blatantly obvious and also updating you on things like when your town becomes a city, when you get prizes and bonuses, how to combat demand and most importantly, when something is ruining your city like a disaster, such as floods, fires, plane crashes or Bowser in a chariot... Yeah, we kind of departed from reality a little there.

Thanks Doc... Now sod off until I need a prostate exam.

There's no real end to the game, you can build and develop, save, come back, build and develop and go from Town to City to Capital to Metropolis and beyond in ranking. You'll invest in stadiums to keep people happy, airports and seaports for commerce and industry to develop and run further risks of plane and boat crashes. There's always a consequence for each action in this game and part of the fun is finding out what the impact will be to the small and minute changes that you make.

Crime map, aka, how badly your Police are doing.

The problem comes from not knowing straight away what will cause what and the impact is not always immediate within the game. You'll put down extra residences but people might not move in. Either because they're too expensive, or not far enough away from industrial areas, or not close enough to commercial ones. Unless you're careful too, you can waste the proximity bonuses of using Stadiums and such, while it's not abundantly clear how to remove a monster unless you've got a big population AND cash. Lots of little trick and traps to fall foul of.

The public are idiots, should be 100% NO at this point.

But if you want challenge, there's 1000 maps to generate and use as a land-start for your Town and City, each having you use the landscape slightly differently while also there's the challenge modes. Where you get given a city, and it's attacked in some fashion or another. Leading you to save the city while you can, some are a lot easier than others such as the floods (I just carried on anyway) the fires (bulldozed burning buildings and slapped in Fire Departments) while some are a lot harder like the nuclear meltdown one. Thankfully you are told what's in demand regarding Residential, Commercial and Industry, but not specifically what needs to go where to make the most of the opportunities.

Ooh! Pick the Boston Nuclear Meltdown!!!

It also has that quaint Nintendo charm of being lively, upbeat, chirpy and bouncy with the graphics and the music (which you can turn off, the music, not the graphics, that'd be fucking stupid). Everything extra from the PC version has Nintendo's touch upon it, which isn't necessarily a bad thing but there could have been better ways to present some of the information and as such this one isn't really intended for the younger audiences out there. But if you've the time and patience, you could learn to enjoy and even love this game.