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
The game on the ZX Spectrum offers nicely drawn backgrounds (although using only two colors and several dithering for the sprites and backdrops, and three colors for the health bar). Surprisingly, you may change the two-color pairs by pressing the 'C' key at the keyboard too! 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. But the game here plays faster than the Amstrad and Commodore versions, and thus it is a bit more playable than the others! The absence of a main-menu tune and the weak in-game sound FX (are on the negative side here.