Bionic Commando

Copyright : Capcom | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

This is Capcom in the time before Street Fighter II, CPS2 arcade boards and Resident Evil and I can tell you that the effort to convert arcade games to computer games in the early 1990s is simply nothing like the conversions we get today, thank god Capcom woke up to the real world.

You are the ultimate fighting machine for the army with combined human knowledge and bionic implants you should be unstoppable by any enemy you come up against. Your lovely and caring creators place you at random places to put a stop to the evil that threatens to destroy mankind using your super strength, bionic arm, legs and weapons to defeat, kill and destroy anything that crosses you path.

The original arcade game wasn?t up to much as I remember it and I have never ever in my computer experience seen a good conversion of this game, but who?s to say the CPC version isn?t a good one with better gameplay and improved graphics...read on...

Graphics

Bionic Commando is your average run of the mill platform based shoot-em-up with some added extras (like the Bionic arm) and it?s nothing more than a stamp on history. There is nothing to keep any serious gamer from hitting the reset keys or even switching off the computer after about 2-3 minutes of playing.

The graphics are awful, it?s like taking a step back for the Amstrad CPC as the game is limited to no more than 3 colours (blue, green and yellow) and your player has no colour what so ever which means that you will blend in to any background just like Kevin Bacon in Hollow Man. Take a look at many of the movie license conversions on the Spectrum and you will notice that your character also disappears but this is something that Spectrum users learned to live with, CPC users expect better as the machine is more than capable of it.

Sound

The sound is again less than active, you may hear the occasional sound now and again but nothing else is even worth mentioning, you might as well turn down your speakers and play it without sound.

Gameplay

The final blow is the gameplay, what makes this game worse than any other platformer is the bionic arm which is supposed to make life for the commando easier. I honestly can?t imagine trying to climb trees with an arm that simply will not do what the player tells it to and then retract the arm before some bad guy shoots you - very poor indeed and I for one have never played this game for longer than 5 minutes.