A playthrough of Sega's 1990 platformer/shooter for the Sega Genesis, ESWAT: City Under Siege.
Played on the default difficulty level.
ESWAT is an early Genesis "adaptation" of the ESWAT arcade game rather than a "port." It's based on the same idea and characters, but it's a brand new game on the home system.
You play as Duke, a police officer in the near-future slumtropolis of Liberty. Liberty is being threatened by EYE, a futuristic uber corporation, and the company's soldiers are waging war on the local law enforcement.
It's basically Robocop by Sega, sans license. Duke is Alex Murphy, Liberty is Detroit, and EYE is OCP. It's a solid framework for a video game plot from 1990.
The game plays like Shinobi, but from the third stage on, Duke gets a jetpack that makes him feel straight out of the RoboCop 3 games. In a good way.
It has the same large sprites and comfortably stiff controls that Sega's early Genesis action games are known for, and it sets itself apart with its cool near-future dystopian vibe, its impressive setpieces, and its hyper 80s sense of color.
I loved the way each level had a distinct theme to its visual design - the lasers that split the foreground and background are a really cool touch in stage 2, and I loved the way stage 5 has a huge miniboss following you in the shadows. For a game that came out 1990, this is some grade A stuff. The soundtrack is great too, and the digitized voices are nice and clear.
The controls are snappy and the jetpack feels nice and weighty, and the game's difficulty is pretty reasonable. There are a few big spikes over the course of the game (and oh man, that last boss is brutal!), but it's generally fair at the default level.
I really enjoyed ESWAT. If you ever played RoboCop 3 and thought, "this would be so much better if only it didn't totally suck!" ESWAT does an excellent job of picking up the slack.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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