Reviews

Conversion of an arcade game I was not really much of a fan of to begin with. Wonderful title music from the brilliant Jonathan Dunn (Robocop, Renegade III) but that's really where the joy lies I'm afraid. It's not dire but it's far from brilliant to say the least. May appeal to fans of this game. Some Imagine games were released under the budget Hit-Squad banner.....this one though was left in the siberian cold to freeze...doesn't take much to figure out why.

I like this game. It is a disaster in almost every department, so the score is gonna be low. But I confess that at 80es I played it and got addicted. I reached final stage, and that gave me great reward. I sensed good arcade action.

It conveys very well the sense of get careful with where you put your feets. Because you can get receiving a bullet by an strategically well located enemy. In that sense of being confronting an ambush after another, the game really succeeds. The action is cool, there are enough different weapons, many enemies, explosions, destroyable backgrounds and even vehicles... vehicles to confront and to ride too.

Just that graphically is horrendous.. overworked, ugly, dirty, blocky..
The programming is better than it seems at first. Because maybe the scrolling isn't a wonder, but there wasn't many options.
Bugs end to ruin the product.. some times picking up a weapon makes you die, and also is possible you get stuck in background having to restart.

As positive note, the controls with two extra buttons for rotating fire direction is a very good choice which eg., ForgottenWorlds had to have included, and IkariWarriors and VictoryRoad would enjoyed too, although the toggle button they had is not bad either.

An Ikari Warriors clone that's clearly on the shoddy side, with confusing graphics to worsen things, but it can be played.

2,75/5

1988 Imagine Software (UK)
by Andrew Postlewhite, Clive Paul, and Jonathan Dunn

This is another arcade conversion which does not do justice to the original. To be fair the arcade game is nothing special, it follows an idea popularized by Commando, with a few additions here and there already seen on other games of the sort. It was an O.K. game, graphically cool, but just OK. The conversion at first glance doesn't even look similar to the arcade, at least graphically were it falls quite short, and the game itself looks more a clone than an actual conversion. So why would you convert to another system an already average game an not make it at least equally average, why take it down a notch like this? It has a Clark Gable look alike in the loading screen, is that enough to hook players? I dont think so. It's playable but below average, and something I wouldn't wish to any of my games: forgettable.

The original arcade game, written by SNK before their Neo-Geo glory days, isn't all that great so you'd expect this conversion to be just as mediocre. Turns out it's even worse.

A pretty bland arcade game gets a shoddy port that turns out to be even less appealing than it initially was. It hardly even looks like its arcade counterpart. There isn't even a game over screen when you run out of lives. When an Ocean/Imagine game doesn't even get a budget release you know it's going downhill, and this certainly did very quickly. Given the same fella wrote the equally poor Motor Massacre for Gremlin as well I shouldn't have been all that surprised.

Unlike some of the other reviewers, I loved Guerrilla War (or Guevara as it was originally titled in Japan before someone at SNK thought Americans could be offended by the obvious references to the Cuban revolution) in the arcades, so I had high expectations for the Spectrum conversion. But when I had the chance of playing the actual game - ay caramba! Jerky and badly drawn sprites scuttling around a jerkily scrolling landscape with lots of green "stuff" around posing as jungle. Poor sound as well, and mostly unchallenging gameplay, which only occasionally makes you feel the heat of the battle. And what about the bug that makes you die when you try to pick up a flamethrower from below?

In a nutshell, a really disappointing conversion. Hasta la victoria? Not at all, this is a resounding defeat.

A mediocre conversion of a cool arcade game in the Commando/Ikari Warriors style.

Anyway, even though it doesn't reach the level of the mentioned arcade games, it's not a bad game to play on the Spectrum.