Cosmo Police Galivan II: Arrow of Justice (SNES 1993, Nichibutsu)

Repetition is and always was a standard issue with beat em up games in the late 80's and early 90's. Even some CD based games in the genre didn't feel like adding in more then six enemies for the duration of anywhere up to 10 stages.

However, this game has a whopping 4 enemies for 15 stages. And they resort to colour swaps sometime around the first level.

Out of the four enemies, the Borg and Shade are the most boring, and only the Oger and Greader are anything to look at, my favourite being the green Oger swap, because it looks absolutely fake and washed out.

But on the other side, the backgrounds, which are usualy mediocre to half memorable in this type of game, are sometimes incredible.

Whoever worked on this was sorely needed in the enemy design department

But what about the gameplay ? Well you'll soon realise that your standart attacks are, for the most part, utterly useless. The key to beating the game, or even surviving whenever you have two laser firing Borg onscreen at once, are the two diagonal moves - the upward punch (seems to only work when going upwards on the screen) and the shoulder throw. In fact, the latter is so effective it makes the second boss an absolute cake walk.

Cocktease # 1: These guys show up in the penultimate level. First time you see them, you hope it's a mid boss.....and then you just walk past several of them suspended in the background.
Son of a -

The bosses, in order, are: A giant face that spits out three colour swapped creatures that you can easily rape with your shoulder throwing move, and which doesn't take any damage but explodes when all three are killed, a clown that can get obliterated with that same move, a human sized frog with shoes on who'se main annoyance comes from the fact that he constantly jumps up and lands on you and is hard to even hit and Henzo, a sumo fetus who'se main attack is jumping up and hurting you with his impact , on the other side of the screen (because the floor vibrating after he lands his fat ass must really bloody hurt) and doing this often so you can't even come close to actually hitting him. If there was a time limit, this would be a very devious way to try and kill you. As it stands, it's just annoying.

Cocktease # 2: These things have exactly two reasons to be there: 1. to act as a wall to make the playing area smaller and 2. to announce to the player that yes, they were perfectly capable of creating more enemies (these guys even have their own shadow for crissake !) but they chose not to because they hate your guts

The last boss is basicly some guy in armour with a big sword that can damage you pretty severly (but if your attack power is maxed out before this stage, you can dammage him just as easily). After a good beating he sheds his armour and starts running around naked doing - what's that audience ? - yes, constantly teleporting around the room making you waste two and a half eterneties before you can even hit the s.o.b.

And then, after all this, what do you get ? A bit of text scrolling on your status screen and then one static page of credits, with a blinking dot at the bottom a lá the same exact comptutery effect from a hundred other games, and.....that's it.

This wasn't a bad game per se, if as much care went into the enemies as into the backgrounds, it would even be far more memorable then it is. As it stands, I'm not sure I can recommend it. You won't pull out all your hair due to frustration, but you'll have spent a good 40 minutes on something barely worth five.