Lethal Enforcers

Lethal Enforcers brings to the Mega-CD one of the most talked-about arcade shooters of the early nineties. The player takes on the role of a police officer who works through a bank robbery, dockside smugglers, a kidnapping in Chinatown, and a final assault on a weapons warehouse. The game is played by aiming at the screen and shooting targets that appear in predetermined waves, and a crucial part of it is telling apart the perpetrators from civilians, since shooting an innocent bystander costs you a life. The pace is sharp from the very start and every mistake shows immediately.

Mechanically, this is pure arcade action built on reflexes. Weapons can be upgraded by picking up a shotgun, a submachine gun, or a magnum with greater range and power, but each weapon has limited ammo, and once it runs out you fall back to your service pistol. Reloading is done by firing off-screen, which keeps the tension up, and the game supports simultaneous two-player play, which gives the whole experience a much more relaxed, different feel. Rounds are short, difficulty ramps up quickly, and the point is mainly chasing a better score. The game is built around forcing the player to judge each target in an instant, which makes it more a test of focus than finger speed.

Visually, the game relies on digitized photographs of real actors, giving it a realistic and, for its time, rather harsh look; this is exactly what made it one of the titles cited in the era's debate about violence in video games. The Mega-CD version benefits from music and voice samples played straight off the disc, and it was also sold bundled with a light gun, with which it plays incomparably better than with a gamepad. Today, Lethal Enforcers is mainly an interesting relic of an era when digitized actors passed for the peak of realism, and it still works as a short two-player action romp on a single screen. Without the light gun, though, it loses a lot, so how well you can replicate the original controls matters a great deal when playing it today.