Operation - Cleanstreets

Operation: Cleanstreets is a French beat 'em up from 1988, also sold as Manhattan Dealers. You play a policeman the game calls Cleanup Harry, a joke so transparent it does not pretend otherwise, and his job is straightforward: clear the neighbourhoods of New York of a drug gang with his bare hands. No extra story, no cut scenes, just a street and the people standing on it.

You move left to right, punching and kicking, and above all picking up whatever the fallen leave behind. The knives and guns that drop matter more here than in most brawlers of the period, because pushing through a dense group unarmed is genuinely hard. Fights are slower and heavier than in the arcade beat 'em ups the game shares a genre with; this is about timing a single blow rather than chaining combinations, which the PC of the day could not have animated anyway.

What caught attention in 1988 was the presentation. The figures are large, the animation is above average for a PC of that year, and the run-down districts have an atmosphere most contemporary conversions never managed. Reviews of the time praised the graphics and were lukewarm about everything else, and that verdict still holds.

The problem is repetition. The enemies come in the same few types, one screen looks much like the next, and the game quickly settles into a rhythm where you keep doing the same thing. Keyboard control is stiff, and once several opponents crowd you there are moments when you simply take a hit and can do nothing about it.

It is worth ten minutes mainly as evidence of what an action game on the PC looked like before the machine learned to move properly for this genre. On oldgame.cz it runs directly in the browser, with nothing to install.