E-Swat: City Under Siege

It’s been a while, but its time to circle back to the Sega Genesis.

I have discussed before how I was a Nintendo kid, only had an SNES, yada yada yada, etc.  etc.  A lot of games I will eventually talk about here will be new to me, but old hat to anyone that grew up on Sega.  Games like Vectorman, Comix Zone and Phantasy Star are “off the beaten path” for me, but many Genesis kids wouldn’t consider them so.  I had certainly heard of them, even if I hadn’t played them.

But this week, I am going to discuss a Sega Genesis game I had never heard of in my life.  Released early in the system’s life cycle in 1990, E-Swat is a 2D side scroller that is somewhere between a run and gun game and a puzzle platformer.  You play as a futuristic police officer named Duke Oda, who is a member of the City of Liberty (not Liberty City, that’s a different place) swat team facing off against a mysterious organization called E.Y.E.  This organization has unleashed a compliment of monsters and evil robots on the city, and its up to Duke to stop them.

Graphically, the game looks okay.  There were some pretty impressive backgrounds for a game made in 1990 and all of the levels are appealing to the eye.  Unfortunately, the character models are not as well done.  They are kind of messy and you can’t tell who is supposed to be what.  I wouldn’t have know Duke was supposed to be a swat agent if the game didn’t tell me.  While E-Swat is technically proficient, there is a certain “dullness” to the colors that I have always maintained is common in Genesis games, especially early ones.  I could never quite explain it, but I swear its a thing.  I have to give them credit for the sound quality though, its way better than you would find in any of its contemporaries.    

The first two levels see you playing as Duke in his standard police uniform.  You are limited to a handgun as your weapon and you die in two hits.  You can shoot forward or straight up, jump and duck and unlike most games of this era, you can walk while ducking.  The enemies are pretty standard fare, just generic grunts that try and usually fail to shoot at you and a few flying enemies.  The gimmick here is that you can take out enemies from below to make your path easier.  It’s kind of cool, most games like this just made you shoot whatever was in front of you.  

The game gets far more interesting in level three, when Duke acquires his robotic e-suit.  It doesn’t allow him to move any faster while walking, but it does offer several new weapons like a plasma gun and rocket launcher.  It also has a jetpack, which allows you to dash and hover.  The game scales the difficulty appropriately, as enemies also become tougher and the levels are laid out in such a way that they force you to utilize all of your abilities.  Enemy positioning is okay as well, although the game takes its cheap shots here and there.  Also, I find the bosses to be a bit on the easy side.  

The problem here is that it is all very slow.  I find this to be characteristic of old Genesis games, particularly side scrollers.  I sometimes forget that the Genesis came out when it did and was as much a competitor to the NES as it was the SNES.  All SNES games have a certain style to them, where Genesis games are kind of broken into two.  If you played E-Swat side by side with a late Genesis game, you would know exactly what I am talking about.  Unfortunately, this really drags down a game that should have been all about running and gunning.  Your weapon only fires a few bullets at a time and Duke jumps like he’s a marionette being pulled on by a puppeteer.  Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for puzzle platforming, but this wasn’t really it.

That isn’t to say E-Swat is bad.  You just have to look at it through the lens of the era it came from.  Gaming was at a sort of crossroads as the 80’s ended and the bit wars began.  Developers were starting to do more with stories, presentation and “games as art” than they had previously.  Playing some of these games kind of shows the awkward shift away from “just games” where the only objective was just to score points or beat a few levels.  Even games that were “just games” started incorporating new kinds of challenge and strategy.  It kind of feels like E-Swat is stuck in limbo between all of these different dichotomies.  They tried to shoehorn in a stupid story, but it didn’t really add anything.  They slowed the pace in an effort to make things more tactical.  Honestly, I prefer that in some genres, but again I think they should have presented something more action focused here. 

I know that this is a bit shorter than a lot of my reviews as of late, but there just isn’t that much more to say.  E-Swat is a slow and plodding, yet somewhat cerebral platformer from the early 90s, nothing more, nothing less.  I think by trying to do too much of both action and puzzle platforming, they didn’t have enough of either.  However, it looks pretty good for its time, offers a fair challenge and has tight controls.  The levels are well designed and the game encourages you to use all of your powers to clear threats as you progress.  I can see exactly why this game is somewhat forgotten and I wouldn’t consider it a must play, but it certainly offers a window into what developers were doing at the time and would be a solid diversion for old school platforming fans.  

6/10