Reviews | Arcade
Cyber Police Eswat (1989)
By Alex Kierkegaard / June 04, 2006
Eswat starts out as quite an enjoyable shoot' em up, but quickly disappoints after the first three stages. That's somewhat ironic because at the start of the fourth stage you are transformed from a frail police officer into an ass-kicking war machine. You'd think that the best part of the game would start then. At least the designers certainly planned it that way.
Unfortunately, that's not how it turned out. I played for a couple of hours until I managed to reach the fourth stage on one credit -- and had a blast -- but gave up on the game shortly after. The difficulty simply goes out of whack at that point. And it's not the "good" kind of difficulty that spurs you to try harder until your skill improves, but the "bad" kind, that stems from silly design choices and leads to frustration and resignation.
It's a shame really because a lot of good work has gone into this. Control is smooth and responsive, stages and enemies are varied and for the most part interesting, and the game has been blessed with vibrant artwork and a nice layer of Sega polish. Even the set-up is compelling. You take control of a rookie police officer who is trying to get promoted to the department's E.S.W.A.T. team of cybernetically enhanced cops. To accomplish that you have to bust three big-shot criminals (a fire-breathing fat man, a really tall guy with a boomerang, and a chain-wielding maniac), who are waiting for you at the end of the first three stages. Then the second part of the game begins, as you receive your promotion and your suit of armor and set off on a series of stages against even tougher criminals: from a demolition expert, to an old man who is able to control animals (including a giant gorilla), to scores of heavily armed thugs.
The first part of the game is very straightfoward. You move down the city's mean streets -- and they do look really mean -- taking out all kinds of low-lifes (punks with pistols and shotguns, kids on skateboards, grenade-throwing mercenaries). Sometimes you jump on balconies and other times behind chain link fences, in a manner similar to Sega's Shinobi (1987) and Shadow Dancer (1989) arcade games. Enemies come from both sides of the screen, or burst through doors and second story windows. You run forward, jump, duck behind crates or parked cars, and shoot to your heart's content (or until you run out of bullets, which doesn't happen very often). It's good clean fun and certainly whets your appetite for more.
Then you finally get promoted to the E.S.W.A.T. team, and things go downhill fast. First off, you really should have been given the ability to fly with that thing, or at least to jump longer distances. That would have made things a lot more interesting. Also, you would expect to be more resistant to enemy fire than before, but no: three hits and you lose a life, three lives total -- same as in the first part of the game. The only advantage you get from the suit is that your left arm turns into a machine gun, which of course packs more punch than the handgun you had before. Oh, and you also gain a smart bomb ability which comes in three variations, but is really not as useful (read: powerful) as it should have been.
The suit is a big letdown. It doesn't do any cool tricks, and what extra firepower it gives you is immediately negated by the fact that enemies become much tougher, and there are more of them on screen than before. The designers would have been better off doing away with the cybercop theme altogether, and simply throwning you a machine gun and some grenades as extra weapons. There's too much build up until you get the damn suit, and no payoff. Making matters worse, level design decides to take a nosedive at that point. Though the stages themselves look just as good, if not better, than the beginning ones, and they become longer and more elaborate, in many later stages there are just not enough landscape features to use as cover. With more enemies and bullets on screen and no health items in sight (like, none), you are in for some heavy punishment.
It just gets frustrating fast, and the only way to keep going is to take it very slow and painstakingly memorize the layout of each stage. Certainly there are some easier and more enjoyable segments, which you can get through with just quick reflexes and improvisation. But the difficulty curve rises and dips in an arbitrary fashion, and the game never really regains the smoothness of the first three stages. Two player mode is enjoyable at first, but gets even more confusing than normal when the going gets tough. And then the end is just big disappointment: a generic factory stage that will make you wonder why you ever invested the time to get that far. To add insult to injury you are not allowed to continue during that last stage, and though this happened in many other arcades at the time, from Shinobi to Rastan Saga (1987) and others, here it's unacceptable given how broken the game is.
I can't help but compare this to RoboCop (1988), a similar game which had come out a year earlier and was the obvious inspiration. Both titles are built on solid foundations, and both could have turned out so much better. RoboCop didn't offer enough variety (largely because it was constrained by the licence), while Eswat has it in spades but stumbles disastrously over weapon balancing and level-design issues. In the beginning both games are equally entertaining, but they eventually end up almost equally dissapointing. Oh well. I'd still recommend you put an hour or two into this if you are into side-scrolling run & guns, since there are not that many examples of the genre pre-Metal Slug. Just don't expect too much.
