Lethal Enforcers is a 1992 light gun shooter video game developed and published by Konami for arcades. The graphics consist entirely of digitized photographs and digitized sprites.

The Story Behind Lethal Enforcers I & II

From that point on, he is going to experience the toughest job that he would have during his years in the police force. The Japanese arcade version of Lethal Enforcers contain several differences from the US and European arcade versions. This was also followed by the arcade game Heroes of Justice, which was localized and renamed as Lethal Enforcers 3 for Western audiences.

The machine guns and grenade launchers can each be used only once but the other four weapons can be reloaded the same way as the revolver. However, it also caused controversy as it allowed players to shoot photorealistic representations of enemies. Along with Night Trap and Mortal Kombat, which were also part of the hearings, the Genesis version was one of the first video games to be rated MA-17 by Sega's Videogame Rating Council.

How Lethal Enforcers I & II Plays

Losing a life reverts the player's weapon to the revolver. A dip switch setting in the arcade version allows operators to let players progress through the stages in a linear fashion ("arcade mode") or select individual stages ("street mode"). Lethal Enforcers has six stages (including the Training Stage): "The Bank Robbery", "Chinatown (on SNES, Downtown) Assault", "The Hijacking", "The Drug Dealers (on SNES, Gunrunners)", and "Chemical Plant Sabotage".

The game is viewed from a first-person perspective. The game ends when all lives are lost, unless the player chooses to continue. The boss character sometimes will have his face exposed; this battle is fought where there are no civilians present.

Why Players Still Load It Up

In the United States, RePlay listed the game as the third top-grossing upright arcade game in November 1992, and then as the top-grossing upright arcade game from December 1992 to January 1993, before becoming one of the top five highest-grossing dedicated arcade games of 1993 in the United States. Its release coincided with the release of another popular game using digitized sprites around the same time, Mortal Kombat (1992). GamePro gave rave reviews for the Sega CD, Genesis, and SNES versions; for the SNES version, they cited the accuracy of the Konami Justifier, the realistic graphics, and the "appropriately hyper music".

The Lethal Enforcers I & II compilation received mediocre reviews, with critics saying that while the conversion is arcade perfect, the gameplay is simplistic and the graphics are highly static compared to contemporaries like Time Crisis (1995). Digitized sprites also became the most popular graphical representation for light gun shooters up until the mid-1990s, with the arrival of Sega AM2's Virtua Cop (1994) which replaced them with 3D polygon graphics. In 1995, Total! ranked the game 58th on its Top 100 SNES Games.

Lethal Enforcers I & II — Frequently Asked Questions