Shoot up some crooks and hunt the criminal masterminds on the turbocharged Street Hawk bike.

Story

Jesse Mach is a secret test pilot cop. He has been chosen by Norman Tuttle, a crack government engineer to employ a top-secret motorcycle project called Street Hawk – and in doing so Jesse gets a chance to avenge the death of his best friend Marty, who was killed by criminal elements in town. Never late to respond when criminal activity is reported Jesse is on a relentless hunt in the name of justice, riding the high-tech Street Hawk super bike.

The Game

Street Hawk for the ZX Spectrum is an action game based on the American Street Hawk TV series from 1985. Following the story of the original series, you play as Jesse Mach fighting crime in the busy city streets. There are two Street Hawk games on the ZX Spectrum, but this is the first one.

When the game starts you’ll find yourself immediately on the back of the Street Hawk prompted to hunt down a bunch of criminals. The game is played from a top-down view where you’ll see Jesse riding his bike up a busy street rolling along vertically. Dodging innocents and blasting criminals with your laser cannon is the main challenge. Your ultimate goal is to stop all the criminals.

Once you’ve reached a certain point you’ll get the chance to stop bank robbers from getting away in a getaway car. You’ll see the scene of the crime from a first person perspective and you get to blast robbers by controlling a crosshair – your laser sight – on the screen. Then, you must stop the criminal mastermind by chasing them down on the streets as they try to escape, and if you’re successful you’re taken to the next assignment.

Controls

Street Hawk is best played with the keyboard. Joysticks are supported, but you will need three functional buttons for the various actions. Playing with a keyboard, you can customize your controls freely from the main menu.
Steering the bike requires some planning ahead, because it is impossible to make quick turns, especially at higher speeds. Thus you must try to anticipate the position of other vehicles all the time, and if you’re caught by surprise there’s always a risk that you won’t be able to save yourself from a collision. The traffic on the road is randomly generated, so you can’t learn it by heart. This also means that you’ll face quite a few situations where you can’t avoid being hit either by cars or enemy fire, which certainly feels unfair. Overall the control is quite slow, so the Street Hawk super bike feels heavy.
Shooting a criminal vehicle requires some precision, and since you can only fire one shot at a time, a missed shot often leaves you defenseless in the line of enemy fire.

Content

Street Hawk features two different game elements – racing and shooting robbers. The racing element is the main focus of the game and is also the one with most depth; you can fire lasers, use the bike’s Turbocharge and jump over obstacles and even crush other vehicles. Every now and then you’ll see cars that fire upon you – these are criminals that you can either avoid or shoot down for extra points. The criminals cars often have a distinct look, so for the most part you can tell them apart just by looking at them, which makes your job a little easier. Make no mistake though; this is a hard and sometimes even unfair game.

On the HUD you’ll see four different energy bars. These represent your fuel, bike damage, laser charge and heat thermometer, in that order. Running out of fuel or wrecking your bike ends the game, where as you’re forced to restart from the beginning. Preserving fuel is something you really can’t do in this game, so having this mechanic in place comes off as just goofy. Damage comes from colliding with other vehicles, crushing vehicles by jumping on them or getting hit by bullets.

Firing the Street Hawk’s laser cannon drains its charge level, but it slowly regenerates itself. This means that as long as you make every shot count, you’ll be fine. Jumping can be done at any speed, but the faster you go the longer you’ll jump. Activating the jump feature generates lots of heat, as indicated by the thermometer. When the bike is overheating you can’t perform jumps but it cools itself off automatically over time.

The HUD also has indicators for Turbocharge and a text message field. Turbocharge instantly sends the bike’s speed indicator into the iconic 300 mph top speed, but sadly there’s little to no difference between the ordinary 127 mph top speed and the Turbocharged one. The text message field essentially tells you the current mission status. It warns you when your bike reaches critical damage level and when the police turns their attention towards you – this happens if you happen to shoot a few innocent people. As such the text messages are redundant and only serves a visual effect that has no real use.

During the street racing you’ll face countless criminals who shoot at you. If you have some leeway you can pretty easily dodge bullets as they travel relatively slowly on the screen. You can also take cover behind innocents, as their vehicles will absorb enemy bullets. If you are in a pinch you can also jump in order to avoid taking a bullet, which is very useful but can lead to other dangers, such as colliding with another car. You can’t control the bike when it is in the air. Collisions with other vehicles is what causes the most damage in the whole game, so it’s a huge risk often not worth taking.
If you happen to collide with the sidewalk, you’ll simply rebound back into the road. This is something you’d want to avoid, because it renders you unable to control yourself for a split second, which often means trouble. All collisions lower your speed, and you really must keep up the pace or you won’t reach the criminals in time.

Bank robbery sequences happen half way through all of the levels. This is a simple point and shoot type of event where you must quickly pick off the escaping robbers as they rush out of the building trying to reach their getaway car. Essentially this is a great opportunity to score some easy points, and if you’ve got a half decent aim you’ll have no problem stopping all the robbers every time. The challenge here isn’t that it’s hard to hit the targets, but for each shot you fire, the crosshair is sent back to its starting position, which means that you must re-aim for each shot.

There are three different stages that take place in various settings. The first stage is set in a suburban area, the second is in central town and the third is in the outskirts of town. As far as we know, there is no end to this game – the same stages keep on looping until you die or run out of fuel. Sometimes, clearing a level will refill your status bars, other times only some bars are replenished. Sometimes when you’ve destroyed the stage boss, the stage doesn’t end but instead leaves you racing down an empty street until you run out of fuel. This happens seemingly at random, so it is considered a bug.
The replay value of this game is pretty low because of its punishing and unfair nature. Its high difficulty level rewards multiple tries as you get better in the game, but still it can throw something at you that can’t be helped like the above mentioned bug or even vehicles that hit you from behind as you’re starting up your bike.

Criminal vehicles can also only shoot one bullet at a time, but their rate of fire has no cool down time. This means that if you happen to land next to a criminal and it hits you with a bullet, it can instantly fire again, and easily hit you repeatedly. This is especially cruel because you can only fire straight ahead where as the criminals can fire at a wide angle, so you’re totally defenseless against this type of enemy fire.

Graphics

Visually ZX Spectrum games have all kinds of limitations, but with that in mind Street Hawk has decent graphics. There are some neat details in the animation, such as the fact that you can see Jesse turn the handle on the bike as it revs up, and all the vehicles cast shadows that look relatively convincing. The details in the background are also worth a mention, because it is pretty charming to see that they’ve tried to capture city life with these disproportionately sized people doing various activities such as bathing in a pool and working on a suntan.
The scrolling is pretty smooth and works well, but it fails to portray the speed in which you travel – it just isn’t fast enough.

Sound

Street Hawk has sound effects for when you fire the laser cannon and destroy other vehicles. You’ll also hear a sound effect when you take a hit from a bullet and when you pass other vehicles. Other than that, there isn’t much sound in the game.

Summary

Due to its random nature, Street Hawk is a pretty damn annoying to play. It can and will mistreat you with numerous impossible situations and it never gives you a break. There’s nothing in the game that makes you want to play it beyond the first loop of levels, and the controls are a bit on the sluggish side. For fans of the TV series, the novelty of playing the 80’s cop hero Jesse may be appealing, but chances are that you’ll be disappointed – it isn’t quite as exciting as it was made to look on television.

Developed By: Ocean Software Ltd
Published By: Ocean Software Ltd
Version Reviewed: ZX Spectrum
Genre: Top-down Racing
Players: 1
Released: 1986