Navy Seals is am action game loosely based on the 90s action movie. You control a US elite commando with the aim to destroy missiles held by terrorists. The game was developed in 1990 only for the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, PC (MS-DOS), the 8bit Amstrad CPC+, Commodore 64 and the 8bit video games console Amstrad GX4000. Although its great graphics and sound, it's also one of the harshest taskmasters you'll come across.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY A special ops helicopter crashed and its crew, composed of elite American commandos (Navy SEALS), has been held as prisoners somewhere in Beirut, by terrorists. A group of five special forces men is now deployed to infiltrate the terrorists' headquarters, rescue the hostages and destroy their stockpile of Stinger missiles. You, as a commando, are called to infiltrate the terrorist facilities, spot and kill heavily armed men and stay stealth as much as possible. Each mission is split into 8 separated levels. Each screen is made up of several platforms, ladders, crates, lifts, explosives and the extremely vigilant enemy guards. Ok, the guards are not responding like in other platform shooter games (running and shooting around). Those guys twist their heads to check the surrounding area and they open fire, usually with a great deal of accuracy! Approach those with caution and make your move while their heads are turned. You start the game with a hand gun, but this can be replaced by a number of weapons found in specific crates (shoot to reveal) but all being of limited ammo, such as M-16 assault guns (better fire-rate), flame thrower and rocket launcher (which wipes out everything). Your SEAL can grab onto a platform and swing or pull himself up, which helps creeping up the enemy guards! Gameplay is ok, but gets very frustrating in places and losing all of your five seals easily, due to the extreme accuracy of the guards or by falling from high grounds. Add to that, the game plays in flip-screen mode which is rather annoying I think, especially when guards or deadly pits are found in the beginning of the screens. The game plays in flip-screen mode which is rather annoying I think. Navy seals is a quite interesting gameplay but due to its extreme difficulty never being a top choice of the genre! The excessive difficulty makes Navy Seals one of the hardest games you'll come across. To be honest, I never made it to the end!
GRAPHICS / SOUND The animation of the sprites cannot be faulted and the graphics throughout are of a very high standard. I would expect more variety in details though, as the screens look rather repetitive. The game plays in flip-screen mode which is rather annoying. The Amiga version is almost identical in graphics to the Atari ST version, offering almost the same amount of colors but with smoother scrolling and animation. The sound is ok, resulting in several high quality sampled sound effects but unfortunately there is no music during gameplay. The introductory tune is nice though.
CPU: Motorola MC68000 7.16 MHz MEMORY: 512KB of Chip RAM (OCS chipset - A500), 512 KB of Slow RAM or Trapdoor RAM can be added via the trapdoor expansion, up to 8 MB of Fast RAM or a Hard drive can be added via the side expansion slot. The ECS chipset (A500+) offered 1MB on board to 2MB (extended) of Chip RAM. GRAPHICS: The OCS chipset (Amiga 500) features planar graphics (codename Denise custom chip), with up to 5 bit-planes (4 in hires), allowing 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 color screens, from a 12bit RGB palette of 4096 colors. Resolutions varied from 320x256 (PAL, non-interlaced, up to 4096 colors) to 640x512 (interlace, up to 4 colors). Two special graphics modes where also included: Extra Half Bright with 64 colors and HAM with all 4096 colors on-screen. The ECS chipset models (Amiga 500+) offered same features but also extra high resolution screens up to 1280x512 pixels (4 colors at once). SOUND: (Paula) 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz. The hardware channels had independent volumes (65 levels) and sampling rates, and mixed down to two fully left and fully right stereo outputs