Lethal Enforcers

There are some genres that just need to be retrofitted ... and fast. Perhaps the first should be the classic shooting games. Not the Dooms and the like, but rather the games like Lethal Enforcers; light gun games that require nothing more than you aiming your gun and pulling the trigger. Lethal Enforcers itself inspired many copy cat games, including Area 51, Virtua Cop and Time Crisis. Each of these games has their own merits, but they all have one thing in common, they lack interactivity.

Lethal Enforcers is an extremely silly game. It is a crime story, similar to a light gun version of NARC, or some of those American Laser Games so popular on the 3DO. It has fair graphics, and features a fairly accurate shooting atmosphere, but it can't get past the fact that regardless how many times you have played the game, it's going to be exactly the same every time.

Each level has a series of still image backgrounds where bad guys (and sometimes hostages) pop up all over the screen. It's pretty basic, shoot the bad guys as fast as you can, or they will attack you. The problem is that each level looks different but plays exactly the same.

There's plenty of good shooting action to be had here, but it's not a real solid game. Perhaps the biggest problem with these kinds of games is the control itself. By giving up the directional pad, you give up all control over your character, and this leads to a pretty basic game that feels like you are on a linear path.

There is also a two player mode in Lethal Enforcers, but this mode makes the game far too easy. Chances are once you've beaten the game once or twice you won't play the game much more anyway, so maybe the difficulty is inconsequential. Either way, Lethal Enforcers is a good port of an arcade game, but not a very good overall game. Keep the light gun in the arcade where it belongs.