Novel concept marred by padded out levels and patience-testing difficulty. Pangburn's review covers most of the shit. You really have to take it slow and manipulate the enemy's appearances, otherwise you're gonna be thrown into situations where you have enemies on the foreground crossing you up while background foes litter your perimeter with shots. And damn those beat-em-up stages really do suck ass. It wouldn't be hard to improve this game tho, it really just comes down to giving you more HP, shortening the stages and culling the melee stages out.

really wanted to finish this one but my infinite lives cheat borked out in level 5 for some reason. I quite literally ran out of infinite lives... so I guess it was really just making it a high number under the hood or something. the game itself is neat: slow beat-em-up style movement on the front layer with the ability to fire pistol shots and crouch, and then a machine guy to spray into the back layer much like a light-gun game. using one precludes the other so knowing which layer to focus on at any given point is key. thankfully every enemy outside of bosses dies in one hit, and most of them have pretty obvious ways of defeating them based on their telegraphs. some may jump over your shots or duck, or they may lay down to shoot and only be open when they're reloading. when there's flow, the game is a fun mish-mash of a couple different dominent trends in arcade gaming at the time.

for some reason this game includes levels where you can't shoot for whatever reason, and the quality in these sections drops precipitously. dick moves very slowly and his punch is painfully short. even with the most basic enemies these sections are absolute chores, and it becomes even worse when enemies with knives who can far outrange you are thrown into the mix. these problems begin bleeding into the regular levels as well when platforming is added. tile-wide jumps are somehow precision platforming in this game, and mixing this with your inflexible and short jump along with your inability to jump when doing any other action is very frustrating. it gets even worse when enemies are added in who lay prone constantly even when reloading, forcing you to jump over their bullets and slowly edge in on them to eventually jump on their backs and finish them off. truly cruel design.

there's also car-ride segments which play pretty much identically to the main gameplay along with bonus rounds where you must shoot gangster cardboard cutouts while perserving those of mailmen and other such friendly figures. the graphics are simple in-game and lack environmental variety, but I appreciate the comic-esque splash screens before and after each stage. mostly interesting as the debut title of mark cerny's Sega Technical Institute, and not much beyond that. it did teach me something important about the early 20th century mob though: advancing in the ranks was mainly dependent on who had the most fucked up looking face or skull, based on the variety of bosses in this game.