Mercs

Definitely a far cry from the arcade version and from the Amiga conversion too. Still a passable game, even if not exactly smooth to play and very hard; at least you've got a energy bar so you don't get immediately killed on contact like many similar games. Music is nice but it gets repeated for the whole game and there isn't any ending sequence; graphics are uneven, generally a bit blocky but there's some good stuff here and there. I detected at least one bug when I got stuck in the water, not sure if there are more. At least there was a 2-players option, though it feels like it wanted to be another Midnight Resistance but failed.

C64 mercs is an abysmal port of one of my fave arcade games. I could live with the rather drab graphics, dull colour palette, the repetitive tune that plays throughout the game and lots of missing stuff from the original (tanks in level 2, etc. ) if the gameplay would be halfway decent. Needless to say it isn't, the jerky movement of the character sprite and the insanely trigger-happy enemies make this game a real chore. What's more, the speed imbalance between the character and enemy soliders results in lots of frustrating deaths, most of the time it's luck that lets you advance a level, not skill. Avoid. 3/10.

In the bottom picture I got stuck and couldn't get out, even when I blew up the building.

Bugged to h*ll

Typical bad U. S. Gold conversion from a capcom machine. The graphic looks worser with every level and the complete game have ever the same enemys. The arcademachine was a nice sequel to Commando but the C64 version looks so much badder than the 6 years older prequel.

Some nice firepower. However, is it because of that or some other reasons, but the framerate is horribly low, considering Ikari Warriors did it in 50Hz