US Gold
£9.99/£14.99

You've seen them on News At Ten: if there's a hostage crisis or some nutter is running around with a gun, the SWAT teams are sent in. Wearing enough metal armour to build several new cars and carrying enough weaponry to start World War III, they blast that and ask questions of the lead-riddled bodies later. Much like the heroes in US Gold's latest release, ESWAT...

Alone or with the help of a pal, you play a member of a futuristic police squad whose task is to crack down on the soaring crime rate. The only way to do this effectively is to don the huge E-SWAT (Enhanced Special Weapons And Tactics) battle armour. But to earn this piece of expensive equipment, you first must fight through the first three levels in an ordinary, flimsy cloth uniform (gulp!).

Initially provided with a mere 9mm automatic pistol and a limited supply of ammo, you must reach the end of each level and kill the resident bad guy. His henchmen aren't going to let some nosey copper just stroll up and blow their boss's brains out, so they fire at you with a range of big, noisy bang-sticks. But ammunition is in short supply so lookout for cases containing ammo clips.

Once the end-of-level bad guy has been arrested, you move to the next level, until level four is reached, when you're promoted to the ESWAT team and allowed to practice your RoboCop impersonation.

In the cassette version of E-SWAT, each level is loaded separately. This would be a pain in the neck with a good game, but as E-SWAT is a pretty dull effort, it's intolerable.

The monochrome graphics are as unimpressive as the gameplay - the character sprites looking more like hunchbacks than normal human beings.

And that's only the 128K game, on the A side. The 48K version is worse. The playing area is squashed to about one third of the screen's height, making the characters fat and unclear. ESWAT offers nothing enjoyable; even the blasting is sluggish. Very unimpressive.

MARK [25%]

A game that could have been so much fun has turned out to be very poor; dire, in fact. For a start off, E-SWAT is cursed with one of the worst multi-loads I've come across for a long time. When you eventually get to play the game, it's hardly worth the effort. The most enjoyment you can get is having a good laugh at the blocky characters that jolt about the screen. The big shock is when you load the game in 48K mode. For some strange reason, if you own a 48K Spectrum you have to endure the game with the playing area compressed, making the badly drawn 128K graphics look even worse. The main characters look like Gordon The Gopher with an American footballer's body! E-SWAT is a game I strongly advise you stay away from. US Gold can do a lot better…
NICK [30%]

US Gold
£10.99 cass/£15.99 disk
Reviewer: James Leach

If ever law and order breaks down, do NOT join the police force. It's something I'd never do. Instead, I'd go off down the shops, choose a really expensive hi-fi, then nick it. Then I'd go into a pizza shop, ask for three really big pizzas, eat then and run out without paying. Then I'd get some really flash clothes, a new pair of baseball boots and a video recorder. And you know what? I wouldn't pay for any of it! Ha! And who'd stop me?

Well, an ESWAT tea might. You'd have to be 'perping' in a dump-hamlet called Cyber City and playing the new US Gold shoot-'em-up, but odds on they'd probably trash you. (Actually, the game's so relatively straightforward they just about trash everybody, but more of that later.)

HEAVY METAL MUTHA!

As the game kicks off you're just a normal bobby. Your ambition is to be accepted into the crap, er, crack ESWAT cop team (a sort of street-level paramilitary set-up) and then work your way up through the ranks. And, lordy-lor, are these boys into their power-dressing! if you manage to get through the first three levels (and thus into the team) then on goes a full metal jacket uniform thingie (with matching trousers) and they strap a mean-mutha lethal weapon onto the end of your arm (a 'handgun' no less, hem hem). Sounds a hit 'Robocopic' to you? Spook! Me too. And the weird thing is the similarities don't even stop there, because next you're sent back onto the streets to...

Shoot more people! (Hurrah!)

And thats ESWAT's biggest problem really - it's just blam-blam-blam at everyone you see. The first lawbreaking bods you meet are just kids on skateboards. Never mind. Shoot them dead. Then shoot anyone looking out of their windows to see what the noise was about. Then shoot anybody who comes out of their house to ask what you meant by blasting their entire family. (And so on.)

BUT SURELY THAT'S WHAT A SHOOT-'EM-UP'S MEANT TO BE LIKE?

Well, er, yes. But not when it's as repetitive and straightforward to master as this. Okay, so there's a few new 'twists' (you've only got a restricted amount of bullets and you can fire backwards and up and down) but in the variety stakes it's a bit of a no-hoper. End-of-level baddies throw bin liners and croissants at you (and molest girlie hostages who are thoroughly ungrateful when you save them). The hardware gets nicer as you move up (as I mentioned). You even get a warehouse or two with lots of boxes everywhere to jump up and down on (probably all the stuff people have nicked from Dixons!). But there's nothing here that really bites your botty and refuses to let go.

To be fair, it's a problem that shoot-'em-ups in general have (so ESWAT isn't really alone). If a game's just about shooting people then you've got to get the difficulty level spot on or the player's going to get very bored very quickly. (Failing the quality of something like Op Wolf, a good way of reducing the risk is to put a puzzle element in, like in Total Recall.)

ESWAT is certainly a competent arcade conversion (the mono graphics are blocky and clear) and it's by no means dire, but at the end of the day, well, you might have moved onto funkier things.