ESWAT: City Under Siege

ESWAT: City Under Siege was released by Sega for the Mega Drive in 1990 and is the home treatment of the 1989 arcade machine E-SWAT. You play police officer Duke Oda in the city of Liberty, where crime has run out of control and a terrorist organisation called E.Y.E. hangs over everything.

The first two missions put you out there as an ordinary cop. Your pistol fires one shot at a time and a single hit kills you. This is the hardest stretch of the game and also its smartest idea, because promotion follows, and with it the ICE combat suit — a difference you feel physically. You survive more punishment, you gain the Super Shot, a plasma rifle, rockets and fire, and you carry a jet pack whose small tank slowly refills on its own.

Flight lasts only seconds, so you hoard fuel for the gaps you cannot cross any other way, and the level design makes good use of that. The suit does not come free, though: it is cumbersome, you move more slowly inside it and dodge worse, so durability is paid for in agility. Otherwise this is a side-scrolling action platformer of the Shinobi school — walk right, shoot, meet a boss at the end.

That is also the main weakness. The pattern never varies, and after a few missions the stages start blurring into one long corridor. The craft makes up for a lot: the graphics were among the better things the Mega Drive was doing in 1990, backgrounds are detailed, they scroll in layers, and the game talks to you in digitised speech. The finale against an AI-driven robot that wants to mass-produce ICE suits and take over the city is a decent full stop. Not a great game, but an honest and handsomely presented one.

On oldgame.cz ESWAT runs straight in your browser, with nothing to install.