ESWAT Cyber Police

No, it's not an online service for pest control. ESWAT is Sega's 1989 tribute to the movie Robocop, and it's the closest anyone has ever come to making a truly great law enforcement action game in which you play as a cyborg, because we all know that's where the future of law enforcement is headed. Why so few games to date have attempted this concept and why so few of these games to date have achieved any degree of success is anyone's guess. It doesn't change the simple fact of the matter, though: We want a remake of ESWAT.

I wonder how many more kids on skateboards I could kill if I were wearing a mobile suit bristling with machine guns...

ESWAT hearkens back to the good old days of gaming in which you shot first and asked questions later. A one- or two-player game, ESWAT puts you and a friend into various side-scrolling stages in which the object is to kill all the bad guys while attempting to reach the end of the level. You start off the scenarios as a flesh-and-blood cop, but by picking up certain power-ups, you harness the power of the ESWAT armor, which allows you to mow down enemies and sustain punishment like nobody's business. ESWAT was originally released in arcades but was then ported to various other platforms, namely the Sega Genesis. The translations were all a bit different, but they kept the cyborg cop theme intact.

Honestly, ESWAT wasn't all that special of a game. It was a good, solid side-scrolling shooter that made you worry about your ammo supply and gave the thrill of switching between being a wimpy, regular old cop and being an overpowered Robocop wannabe. But there were a lot of other, similar games at the time. What makes ESWAT memorable is its concept. Most games revolve around killing bad guys, but ESWAT was especially pure and straightforward about it.

And we do, in fact, believe that this concept could legitimately make for an exciting new game.

By now there are a ton of real-world squad-based shooters, most notably games like Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3 and SOCOM II: U.S. Navy SEALs. Combine the relatively realistic law enforcement/antiterrorist gameplay of those games with the ability to use a giant honking robot suit, and you've got grade-A gaming entertainment.

Now that's more like it!

ESWAT also hearkens back to an era in which cooperative multiplayer gaming was much more common than competitive play. This was no accident; co-op gaming can be a lot of fun, and we wish more games these days featured levels and campaigns that we could play through with our friends. Co-op play is especially interesting when new, two-player game mechanics are introduced into the mix, and here, our imaginary new ESWAT game could also excel. Real cops work in pairs, and this new ESWAT could take full advantage of such a two-player dynamic.

Above all, though, we're really itching for a good cyborg cop game right about now, and we can think of nothing better than a remake of ESWAT to scratch that itch.

Thanks to The Killer List of Video Games for the screen shots.