Green Beret

STORY / GAMEPLAY
During the Cold War, a United States special operations soldier infiltrates a USSR military base in order to save several POW's from execution. There are four stages: a Marshalling Area, a Harbor, an Air Base and a Siberian Camp. Upon starting the game, your only weapon is a combat knife which can be supplemented with captured arms. By killing certain enemy soldiers you can obtain a three-shot flamethrower, a a four-shot RPG, or a 3-pack of hand grenades. At the end of each stage, you must fight a unique group of enemies. The gameplay is hard enough to progress here. Sometimes there are too many enemy sprites running towards you and you cannot do much to avoid them or even take them out! Also the choice of colors for the backgrounds and sprites is making the gameplay even worse, as it is almost impossible to see (and then avoid!) an enemy bullet fired!!! Apart from its high level of difficulty, Green Beret is a quite interesting game to play...

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The CPC runs in flick-screen mode but offers some nice background graphics and nicely drawn sprites. Note that the C64, Spectrum and Atari versions offer better visuals (limited to their hardware) when compared to the CPC, with more detailed stages! What I didn't like on the CPC is the pretty much choppy flip-screen which slows down the action and most of the times makes the gameplay unfair (especially when the enemy is very close to you, a second before the screen changes, resulting to a sudden death...). Although the CPC uses a better (brighter) color-palette, the game runs way better on the 8bit Atari, Commodore and Spectrum (!). The game's sound is good, featuring some nice sound effects with a background music (a rather repetitive one).