Human Killing Machine

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Developing team Tiertex is known as the responsible team that converted the arcade version of Street Fighter to the PC. This time, Tiertex decided to create their very own fighting game, separately from the official Street Fighter license. To the game now, the player's character is Kwam, a fighter from Korea and (like all fighters of the game) he sets out to prove his superiority against all the other marital artists. He travels in different places of the World, like Russia, Amsterdam, Spain, Germany, and ultimately Beirut, to confront and defeat each and every challenger! Note that the range of the available-in-battle moves seems relatively limited, probably because much of the game's memory size is used to generate the stunning backgrounds! HKM is a really good and fun game to play and it's among the best fighting games ever appeared on the 8bit home computers!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
HKM has impressive and nicely drawn backgrounds, especially on the CPC version which considered to be the best compared to the ZX and Commodore versions (the latter actually looks totally different!). The CPC version is colorful enough to impress although it is running in Mode 1 (320×200 pixels) with only 4 colors on screen!!! Each stage offers a specific landscape taken from each of the 5 countries visited, but possibly because of the memory used for these excellent background graphics, the animation suffers a lot sporting very few frames of animation and lacking any degree of background scrolling!. As far as the sound, the game offers an main-menu theme, while there only a few basic fighting sound FX during gameplay.