Given that I spent a fair amount of my childhood hoarding quarters before spending them at the arcade, and that I love arcade games so much that I built a cabinet to help capture the feel of playing them while at home, I generally have a soft spot for games in that style. Granted, titles made for home systems may not have quite the same level of sophistication graphically as their arcade counterparts, but there’s no mistaking games that have action taken directly from popular machines.

When I first loaded up City Hunter I was actually pretty excited as it immediately brought the arcade classic Rolling Thunder to mind, featuring my character moving along different floors of a building, shooting incoming bad guys, and going into different doors. To some minor extent that comparison does hold, though here the focus isn’t just plainly on surviving as long as possible, you’ll instead be on a small number of missions where you’ll need to go from room to room, working through the various steps it will take to successfully complete them. What that does though, in effect, is turn the environment you’ll be moving through into a giant fixed maze, with you being the determined rat needing to go back and forth to finally get the cheese.

I suppose that you could choose to dig into this, despite the somewhat repetitive and aggravating nature of finding yourself in areas that look the same and shooting droves of enemies over and over again. Perhaps that would be easier if the game didn’t feel quite so buggy and simply unfair though. Granted, you do have quite a lot of health, and there will be a scant number of opportunities to replenish it, but you’ll also take a fair amount of utterly cheap damage. Whether that’s being hit the moment you get onto a new floor, or coming out of a door, or simply having someone out of view shooting at you as you approach, even by standards of games in the era this was originally made in, it isn’t great. I do appreciate the added bonus content and options to at least let you experience the game with some relatively minor differences, but when you get down to the gameplay this still feels frustratingly of its time, and just a bit too thin on excitement.