Previous Next

In your best Antoine "Rapido" de Caulle voice say "Maintenant, Activision c'est different. Vive la difference!" Activision might be French now but Beast Busters is a Japanese coin-op created by SNK, converted by British developers Images. Small world, innit?

Beast Busters is a three-disk shoot-'em-up, along the same lines as Operation Wolf. That's obvious just by looking at the screenshots. "Abandon hope," shouts the box, prophetically. "Can you handle fiendish creatures and gory doom?" it enquires. Yes! Anything preferable to the hype.

When the game's loaded, press the mouse or joystick to start. Beast Busters has a simultaneous two-player mode using two different coloured gunsights. The green cross is controlled by the mouse and the red one by the joystick.

The mouse-user has a definite advantage over the poor sucker - sorry, player! - on the joystick. You can whizz the mouse around but the joystick feels like it's the handle on a wooden spoon in an enormous week-old vat of congealed porridge. Because of this, two-player Beast Busters is team-work rather than a competition between the two of you.

The control method is pretty much the same as the basic plot to the game - all you have got to do is point and shoot. The zombies are up and running and you're their splatterer and leveller. It's just a straightforward question of how far you can make it before some body cuts you down.

You start in the town, on a trip through the mall where zombies infest the escalators down to the subway. This first level uses a combination of diagonal and sideways scrolls to get you to the platform below. A subway train full of rotten first-classers pulls in - shoot the windows! Off the zombies before they're off the train.

Splatter-mania takes over by about Level Two - the rush down a long tunnel. Zombies and bats hurtle headlong into you, spewing red lumps of meat into the air as you slice 'n dice. Bullets, extra grenades, and occasionally first aid, drop out of the sky. Remember Operation Wolf? Same deal. Shoot 'em and they're yours.

Beast Busters continues in the same vein (varicosed and ruptured probably!) for the rest of the game. It alternates between a head-on rush and a sideways or vertical scroll.

After the town and subway, the background scenery takes you to a ghost town. Fire hydrants burst when you hit them and there's even a collapsing building. Motorbikin' monsters take pot-shots and Cortina-driving crazies play chicken with you.

From here you go to a river where piranha fish leap out to taste human-fingers. Pathology-lab patients surfing down the sewers lead you to a factory. You meet the obligatory mad scientisdt with token girlie hostage and guess what - you've got to shoot him and miss her.

Beast Busters is hackneyed nonsense - but it's strangely endearing nonsense. It's pure violence in a form that's difficult to take seriously. There are no problems of morality either - unless you're into zombie rights!

It's got all the pap appeal of the original zombie splatter-movies which so obviously inspired it. But I wouldn't pay 26 quid to see all those again - and I don't think I would for Beast Busters either.

1. A lot more goo and splatter than Horror Zombies From The Crypt.
2. The dismembered corpses make it more like post Operation Wolf.
3. Fast, furious action with an Operation Thunderbolt style two-player mode.
4. Not as tough as the Ops, so it won't last as long.
5. There's more visceral violence in Beast Busters than Predator 2.