Human Killing Machine

This 1989 fighting game was developed by Tiertex and published by U.S. Gold for various home computers as an unofficial sequel to their port of the first Street Fighter, using the same game engine, but different characters to the original Street Fighter. It is the first fighting game to feature four-legged animals (Shepski and Brutus), it was released twenty-three years before the likes of Samurai Shodown VI and Fighting is Magic/Them's Fightin' Herds.

The 8-bit computer conversions have terrible graphics in comparison to the more decent graphics on the Atari ST and Amiga versions. Unfortunately in the Amiga version, the fighter sprites are glitched up (especially Merkeva's), the Barcelona level is missing, leaving Miguel and Brutus in Amsterdam, and the issues weren't fixed. Worst of all, the ZX Spectrum version only has the 48K version, at a time when most games also had an enhanced 128K version. As a result, the game is a multi-load, as each location has to be loaded in separately. There are also no sound effects whatsoever (except for the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum versions) and terrible music.

Like with the Tiertex port of Street Fighter, HKM is very slow-paced and has a choppy framerate. Also, like in the original Street Fighter, there's no character select screen. However, unlike the original Street Fighter, there's no two-player mode. You can only play as Kwon, an expy of Ryu who's a Korean fighter that, for some reason, wears boxing gloves and has no special moves. Even worse is his awful strength system. Initially, he starts out as "Strong", can be knocked over five times and only needs to knock down the opponent three times in order to win. However, for example, if Kwon performs badly (i.e. get knocked down twice), he is declared "Weak", and needs to be knocked down three times whereas the opponent needs to be knocked down five times to win. Combined with the unbalanced opponents and regenerating health, this just makes the game even harder than necessary.

The animations look lousy, as the characters just shuffle across. The developers made it so all of a given character's frames of animation could be shoehorned into a single screen worth of space. Aside from that there's no parallax scrolling or any stage scrolling at all.

The opponents are horribly unbalanced with overpowered moves that deal a ton of damage compared to Kwon's attacks, which deal very miniscule damage. For instance, Igor, the very first opponent in the game, can drain a ton of health from Kwon or even kill him with a single hit from his rifle. Also, the opponent's health can regenerate much faster than Kwon's, making it unnecessarily difficult to knock the opponent down.

All of the opponents look ridiculous and are loaded with racial and national stereotypes like it's been made for a joke:

• The first opponent is in Moscow, named Igor, who is a Soviet soldier that wields a rifle.
• The second opponent is Igor's dog, named Shepski.
• The third opponent is in the red light district of Amsterdam, named Maria, who is a prostitute.
• The fourth opponent is Helga, who, like Maria, is also a prostitute.
• The fifth opponent is in a bullfighting arena in Barcelona, named Miguel, who is a matador.
• The sixth opponent is a bull named Brutus.
• The seventh opponent is outside a cottage in Germany, named Franz, a waiter who throws an infinite supply of wine bottles.
• The eighth opponent is Hans, who looks like he came out of a European 1970's porno movie.
• The ninth opponent is in Beirut, named Sagan, who looks like a terrorist.
• The tenth and final opponent in the game is Merkeva. He's the biggest opponent of them all and has only six animation frames, two of which are only used when he's defeated.
• There's no real ending: once you beat Merkeva, the game loops back to Moscow and Igor.

All I have left to say: Bad Tiertex (smack), don't do that anymore.