Game Review: Gun Law (Atari, Mastertronic)

Gun Law, Atari, Mastertronic - IT0146
  • 3/10
    Score - 3/10
3/10

Summary

Gun Law had the potential to be a competent, if not great tribute to CapCom’s arcade classic Commando, but sadly it falls short on almost every level. Let down by frustrating controls, cluttered level designs, and flawed gameplay mechanics it’s one for die-hard fans of the arcade run and gun shooter genre only.

Sending
User Review
0/10 (0 votes)

I’ve mentioned in other reviews that Mastertronic wasn’t afraid to release games that were “influenced” by arcade classics. Some were blatant clones of games we had come to know and love from the arcades, while games like Gun Law for the Atari (and later ported to the Commodore 16) didn’t hide their arcade roots but tried to at least be a new game…

Gun Law – Commando Of The Future

Set in the future, Earth has been taken over by aliens (why do they always want to invade us?). Left on your own after all the other human survivors have abandoned the area, and no other weapons apart from a machine gun, it’s just you against the aliens in a fight for survival.

It’s a clichéd storyline and as with most arcade games, pretty absurd. The “one person against an army” is bad enough, but one against a technolgically superior one makes even less sense. Obviously you have to suspend belief a lot with this one. Anyway, the game is spread over five vertically scrolling levels and just take out as many as you can but above all else… survive!

Looks Good… Until You Start

There’s no title screen to speak of, and the game opens up showing the playfield itself. It looks good enough and anyone familiar with Commando will feel right at home so at this point everything seems to be going well for Gun Law. Until you press the fire button to start the game. And that’s when it all falls apart…

The first thing that strikes you are the controls. Gone is the 8-way movement for games of this nature and now you can only move up, down, left and right. The alien soldiers are restricted in the same way, but it does make running around the game playfield more difficult and makes the game feel less responsive right from the start. That would be hard enough to cope with in itself, but when you stop pushing the joystick, your character automatically turns to face up so you can’t stop in one spot to keep firing in any particular direction.

He Shot Me!

The controls are the least of your worries playing Gun Law though. In most games like this, once you shoot one of your opponents they disappear from play and can’t hurt you any more. Not here. For some reason, the developer decided to give all the alien soldiers the ability to have a “reflex shot” so when they are killed they can fire off a final volley of shots towards you. This makes the game unnecessarily difficult and requires more precise positioning before you fire a single bullet.

But that’s not the only issue when it comes to the alien firepower. I lost count of the number of times I lost a life to shots that came at me from soldiers that weren’t even on the screen! Shots came at me from all sides of the screen so it was all too easy to lose a life to an alien you couldn’t actually see!

 

Can’t Touch This

One of the most frustrating aspects I found to Gun Law was the inconistency towards collision detection. More specificially, the rules surrounding what you could and couldn’t touch. Throughout play, it’s perfectly fine for the player to walk into the alien soliders scattered throughout the terrain without harm but if you try walking towards any of the small ponds on the ground you’re killed immediately! Granted, this issue with the ponds is exactly the same with Commando (both the arcade and all the home ports), but it’s still something that has always irritated me.

You can use buildings, trees, rocks and anything else on the ground to take cover from enemy firepower but this also proves to be problematic. There is simply far too much of the smaller bushes and rock formations scattering the landscape and while they do give you that all important protection, it makes movement much harder as you can’t walk through any of it, even the smallest blade of grass protruding from the ground.

Graphics and Sound

At first glance Gun Law doesn’t look too bad and everything moves smoothly enough. However, there is very little in the way of animation on any of the character sprites and to be honest I felt that all of the buildings and terrain itself looked rather bland. Certainly, when compared with the later Commodore 16 conversion it is quite lacking, but despite using a better colour palette it’s not as detailed or defined as the official Commando arcade conversion that was released as you can see below.

Sound is limited to gun fire, laser shots and white noise explosion effects and while they suffice I do feel as if more could have been done. In fact, the effects seem to be rather generic and used on countless other Atari games and are nothing memorable.

Playability

All of the core elements are there to make Gun Law a good, if basic Commando clone. While there’s no hand grenade there’s plenty of shooting action to keep arcade fans happy but it’s hampered throughout by basic flaws that should have been screened out by basic playtesting. It was far too easy to get killed throughout the game making it far too difficult, and when you did lose one of your lives you were automatically sent back to the start of the current level unless you had reached the final screen on each.

To add to the frustration, the alien soldiers seem to respawn an almost infinite number of times. In itself this wouldn’t be a problem if you were able to move around the playfield quickly enough or didn’t have to worry about being shot by an invisible assailant. Instead of being a fun experience it becomes a war of attrition and that’s not what you want from a game.

Overall

I’ll be honest, I was really looking forward to playing this. I loved Commando in the arcades and truthfully enjoy most of the home conversions or games inspired by it. And while I did get some entertainment from Gun Law, it was sadly short lived. Ultimately, it proved to be too frustrating to keep my attention for too long and after being sent back to the start far too many times I found myself wanting to look elsewhere. The Atari is capable of so much more and truthfully I don’t think it would have taken more than a few tweaks to have made this a much better game. You’re better off seeking out the superior Commodore 16 version or stick with the conversion of Commando instead.

* * *

You know what we think but why not share your thoughts on this game! Let us know what you think of it in the comments below, or add your own score using the slider in the summary box at the top of the review!

Please follow and like us:

2 Trackbacks / Pingbacks

  1. Mastertronic Best Sellers - Mastertronic Collectors Archive
  2. Atari (8-Bit) Mastertronic Checklist - Mastertronic Collectors Archive

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*