Lethal Enforcers (Sega CD) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
335A playthrough of Konami's 1993 light-gun shooter for the Sega CD, Lethal Enforcers.
Played through on the normal difficulty level.
First appearing in arcades in 1992 (with ports later appearing on the SNES, Genesis, Sega CD, and PlayStation, all of which I've linked to below), the game made a huge splash thanks to its use of digitized images in place of more traditional hand-made sprites. While other games had used this technique before this one did, Lethal Enforcers's release date placed it squarely in the middle of the media frenzy decrying realistic depictions of violence in games, right alongside Night Trap and Mortal Kombat.
You play as a Chicago cop who is sent to deal with a series of five "situations" that develop around the city. With little in the way of backup, you act as an army of one against crimes that escalate to a ridiculous scale with nothing but your service revolver, barring the occasional upgrades that you'll find lying around such as uzis, shotguns, and a grenade launcher.
The game plays a lot like Freedom Force or Operation Wolf - it's a shooting gallery with all sorts of colorful backdrops and characters dropped in as windows dressing - and man, does it deliver the entertainment. You take out small sporty cars holding impossible numbers of hitmen, a crazed renegade military office firing rockets from a jumbo jet, and even an Apache helicopter from a factory catwalk before you can call it a day.
All of the backdrops are digitized photos shot on location in and around Chicago, and the people are all actors dressed up in costumes, and here's a big hint: if you aren't sure who is innocent, just shoot at the people in sunglasses. Apparently the criminals never figure out that they'd be safe if they took them off.
The Sega CD version is an "enhanced" version of the Genesis game (https://youtu.be/lL5l76MVfgU ) that had been released several months earlier. The music sounds great with its new Redbook remixes and the sound effects and voice clips sound much cleaner here than in the Genesis game.
Unfortunately, the graphics are about the same. The blotchy, dithered backgrounds and sprites appear to be identical to those in the Genesis version, meaning that enemies are still at times way too difficult to differentiate from the backgrounds (or even worse, you can't see them at all when they pop up directly behind someone who has just been killed - super unfair).
The game can (and should) be played with Konami's Justifier light gun, which feels sharp and accurate despite the occasional hiccups I experienced when trying to aim at the right edge of the screen. You need the accuracy, too, as the game can be pretty difficult until you've memorized the stages. (It's not nearly as difficult as Lethal Enforcers 2, though!)
The Sega CD version's updated soundtrack is welcome, but this port of Lethal Enforcers ultimately doesn't do much to justify its move to the CD. Of all the 16-bit home ports, I think that I'd probably still recommend the SNES version: the animation is worse in that one, but the graphics are much cleaner so the enemies don't get lost as easily as they do in the Sega games' dithered pixel mush, and it also retains some of the arcade version's interactive background elements.
But regardless of the platform you play it on, Lethal Enforcers is a memorable Konami classic that I still enjoy to this day.
Here are a few other versions if you'd like to see more:
Arcade version: https://youtu.be/88gD1gXxxPo
SNES version: https://youtu.be/My_4TYwqlRU
Genesis version: https://youtu.be/lL5l76MVfgU
PlayStation version: https://youtu.be/r0NuS6Mlsy8
NES version: https://youtu.be/FoPCsIX9v0E
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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