Lethal Weapon

Riggs and Murtaugh found themselves on PC in the nineties, where they got a platformer so wild the movie would be jealous. Lethal Weapon from 1992 is a rough piece of action that bets more on keeping you shooting and jumping than on brains.

You play as one of the detectives and go through seven or eight levels across the city and industrial zones, where another thug with a gun waits around every corner. The game is straightforward — you run forward, jump, kill enemies, they chip away your health, you fall into a pit and start over. No puzzles, no hidden paths. Just action in its simplest form.

The controls respond without issues, the graphics are decent — the characters look like paper cutouts, but you can tell them apart. The real problem is the difficulty, which behaves like a bull without a driver — sometimes the game is too easy, other times you won't beat it without cheats even with your most patient neighbor. No checkpoints, so when you're just five meters from the goal, you start from the beginning again. Balance isn't exactly a strong suit.

Today it looks like an average licensed game that existed because it had to. It had no ambition to be great, it just sold on the name. And it did sell, even though the nineties were full of better platformers. I remember more disappointment than fun.

If you want to see what it looked like when a license was handled without passion, it's everywhere online. It's surprisingly playable and sometimes even funny in how little effort it put in. It's not a bad entertainment artifact from when everyone was desperate for movie games.