Cleaning Up the Streets by Beating Some Meats

Considering it’s been 26 years (as of the time of this writing) since we last had a Lethal WeaponFirst started with a script by Shane Black, the Lethal Weapon franchise (movies and television) tells the story of older cop Murtaugh and his loose cannon, living on the edge partner Riggs. film in theaters (and even five years since even the moderately decent TV series went off the air) it’s easy to forget that there was a time that Lethal Weapon was a big franchise. The films were well received by fans and they managed to bring in nearly $1 Bil at the Box Office. Considering that, at the time, films didn’t usually make more than a few hundred Mil, that kind of take made studio suits take notice. Lethal Weapon, alongside Die HardThe 1980s were famous for the bombastic action films released during the decade. Featuring big burly men fighting other big burly men, often with more guns, bombs, and explosions than appear in Michael Bay's wildest dreams, the action films of the decade were heavy on spectacle, short on realism. And then came a little film called Die Hard that flipped the entire action genre on its head., made the R-rated action comedy into a genuine genre, and it turned Mel Gibson and Danny Glover into legitimate stars.

Of course, the franchise has since fallen from grace, with a fifth film nowhere to be seen for years upon years, and the supposed finale (titled, naturally, Lethal Finale, still being worked on, possibly to never see the light of day). Back in the 1990s, though, putting the Lethal Weapon name on something was as good as printing money. People lined up, Hollywood collected their cash, and everyone left happy (at least until the horrible fourth film came out and people started going, “maybe we’ve seen enough of this franchise”).

Timed for release with Lethal Weapon 3, the NES received its own Lethal Weapon edition. Simply called Lethal Weapon, the game doesn’t have much to do with that third adventure, or any of the other previous films. Hell, the game really doesn’t have much to do with Lethal Weapon at all, aside from featuring two cops, one white and one black, who go out to “clean up the streets”. This is otherwise a pretty generic belt-scrolling beat-em-up in the vein of Double Dragon or Bad Dudes. Which was, of course, a popular genre at the time.

The game (there was both an NES and a Game Boy version of this title, which played functionally the same, although I played through the NES version for this review) puts Riggs or Murtaugh (you can switch them when needed) up against nine stages of beating and shooting action, from the park, to the mall, and out onto the freeway of Los Angeles. As they go from one zone to the next (nine in total), the two cops have to fight their way through wave after wave of enemies, taking out all who cross their path until they get through the stage, defeat the final bad guy, and clear L.A. of crime. All in a day’s work for these two heroes.

The first thing you’ll notice when playing this game is that, for a Lethal Weapon title, there’s absolutely no humor or cinematic quality in this game. While action movies and games were a dime a dozen even back in the NES era, the Lethal Weapon movies were known for this comedy as well as their action. The films always spent plenty of time with the characters, letting us into the personal lives of Riggs and Murtaugh, watching as Riggs found one way after another to harass his put-upon partner. The game features none of that, and while I understand the focus was on the action, would it have been so hard to put a few cinematic cut-scenes into the game just so we could get some (text-based, of course) banter between the heroes. Anything to make this feel like a Lethal Weapon game and not a generic action adventure?

I say this because the game itself is painfully generic. You start in a park that could have been ripped from Double Dragon or River City Ransom before moving through the rest of the city, stage by stage, and each stage feels like another set piece ripped from a beat-em-up adventure. All the graphics are bright and colorful, sure, but none of them have any personality or flair. It’s just one basic stage after another where you do the same things over and over again until the game ends. Punch, shoot, throw a grenade, and repeat.

A big issue is that there aren’t a lot of ideas in this game. The first stage features basic thugs who punch and shoot, thugs in foxholes who shoot and throw grenades, and helicopters that fly along the top of the screen, shooting and dropping grenades. This, aside from some different sprites for the enemies that functionally change nothing about what the guys do, is all you will see for the rest of the game when it comes to enemies. There are also dudes in every stage looting buildings, walking away with packages, but they’re just there for you to kill them to get power-ups. These enemies show up in every stage, every time, and once you’ve gotten through the first stage that’s it for variety.

The same is actually true for the bosses as well. The first stage features an Asian kickboxer as the boss. The second stage has a fat dude (who looks a little like Kevin SmithConsidering where he came from, working as a clerk in a convenience store, it's pretty impressive that (for at least a little while) Kevin Smith became a defining cinematic voice of a generation.). These two alternate as the bosses, back and forth across stages (increasing in the number you have to fight but not changing in any other way). There is a third boss who pops into the rotation about a third of the way into the game, a bigger guy that looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and then that’s it until the end of the game when the Final Boss arrives. Three bosses for eight stages, and then they’re reused again as sub-bosses in the final stage. It’s so tedious.

The combat isn’t better, either. You can shoot and you can punch, and occasionally you’ll get one-use projectiles, like knives and grenades. That’s really it for the whole game, and, again, you see all of this in the first stage. The only thing the game has to add “variety” to the combat is increase the health of the enemies. You can kill everything in one hit at the start of the game but by the end enemies have their health quadrupled (slowly, over the course of the game). This really doesn’t improve anything, it just draws it out longer, but then making things longer (and not better) is all the game seems to know how to do.

While you can shoot in this game it’s better to think of the game as a beat-em-up. That’s because your gun, for whatever reason, is the weakest weapon you have in your arsenal. Your punches and kicks actually do more damage, meaning that while you can use your gun (and pick up ammo to replenish your stock of bullets) you’re much better off staying in close to enemies and punching them. In fact, this is the best way to defeat bosses since those guys don’t tend to have much in the way of invincibility frames so just wailing on them as fast as you can punch tends to bring them down fairly quickly.

It wasn’t too hard getting through the game, start to finish, once I knew what I was doing. This is considered one of the harder NES games and I can understand why. It takes so long to kill enemies by the end of it and you have to do a lot of cheesing (hiding, jumping, using the areas around you) to get enemies in position and take them out. But, once you get into that mindset you can likely get through the game within a couple or three attempts… if you wanted to put in that kind of effort. I simply don’t see why you’d want to considering that once you’ve played through the first stage you’ve seen all that this game has to offer.

Lethal Weapon on the NES is competent enough. Challenging, yes, but I wouldn’t say unfairly so. The issue is that it lacks creativity. In a field packed with beat-em-up games, this title barely stands out. The only thing interesting about it was the name Lethal Weapon, but considering the game then does nothing with that license (outside of a black character and a white character), you really can’t call it a proper Lethal Weapon game even still. And when you consider that the NES was primarily owned by kids, and the movie series was R-rated, I have to wonder how many kids were drawn in to play the game based on the name alone. This feels like a failed effort all around.