Please login to submit a screenshot

NOBODY said it was going to be easy, but on the other hand nobody said it was going to be quite as hard as this. You have been cut off deep behind enemy lines with little or no equipment. The battle now is for survival. Interestingly, no mention is made of who you are fighting. Could be any frontier, any hemisphere: Nicaragua, Honduras, rerun invasions, death squad Salvador – one world and it is a battleground. Where is there a more just cause for fighting, where is there a better motto than "Fight or Die"?
Armed initially with only a single-shot repeater and an unlimited supply of ammo you will come face to face with enemy marines, tanks, frogmen, motorbikes, helicopters and planes.
The levels all look fairly similar, from a strategic point of view at least. There are usually one or two pieces of scenery hanging around in the foreground for the player – or players if you plugged in a second joystick and went for the two-player option – to cower and cringe behind. Beyond this are one or two structure like buildings and walls for the enemy to hide behind.

Moving the joystick left and right, up and down moves the aiming sight in the respective direction. Unfortunately, it also moves your man – you cannot aim far right while being on the left-hand of the screen. This makes things more interesting. It is not enough just to be able to aim excellently, but you must also keep a careful eye on your own current position. Stray into enemy fire and it is Goodnight Vienna, Berlin, Moscow and Saigon.

The enemy will pop up, fairly predictably, have a few shots at you, take advantage of any natural cover and run off again. Dodge grenades, bullets and shells. If you move fast enough you can roll along the ground and miss everything.
Pull the joystick down quickly to throw a grenade. In my experience this is nearly always done by accident. Grenades are useful for dispatching the frequently appearing tanks and the odd crowd of persistent attackers. They are fairly effective against buildings too – remember, it is important to destroy these quite rapidly so you can see what is going on.
Hitting some targets will release bonuses in the form of advanced weaponry or extra grenades, but you will have to be quick.

Once you have killed a certain number of baddies you will progress to the next scene. There are four scenes to each level and each level ends with the customary superhuman bad thing that requires a high degree of manual dexterity and more than a modicum of blast power to get rid of.

Animation-wise there is nothing to get too excited over. The tanks are quite good but the rest would not look too much out of place on an 8-bit machine. The colours chosen seem to be a little strange but I would not want them doing my interior decorating.
The two-player option is interesting. It is one of the few games of this type where two people playing together will end up cooperating rather than competing.
Green

"A little better than the counterparts, but not by much."

Cabal is a game that has some interesting game play features attached to it in the way that most action games from that era just don’t seem to have. Featuring the action from behind the character instead of a side scrolling or overhead view is something that is still a rarity in today’s market. Though the game was featured on a system that really didn’t have much going for it in the American market, it plays much better than the NES and Arcade versions that you can still find today.

-The Game Play-

What you have here is something a little different than the normal run and gun action that you might find in Ikari Warriors or Time Soldiers. More to the point, you’re stuck on the bottom of the screen and your ability to fire on enemies is dependant on whether you move out from behind the wall that is hiding you or not. Enemies move from left to right at the middle of the playing field, and you have to come out from behind the wall and blow them away before they have the chance to escape. What hinders this is the fact that the control doesn’t always let you go the way that you want and targeting is hard to deal with.

The enemies and the stages themselves are pretty straightforward, with the enemy count located at the bottom of the screen. For every one enemy that you whack, the bar will change color and you can tell how many enemies you have left depending on how far the bar is filled. Tanks, soldiers and other various attackers will be your targets, and you’ll be able to fire on them with a machine gun, or any weapon you happen to pick up during your quest for blood. Once you’ve defeated enough enemies, you’ll be able to move up along the road to the next area where more difficult enemies await you.

The control that you find here on the other hand is probably the one thing that nails the coffin lid closed. From your hiding spot, you have to move your character out from cover and then use a small targeting reticule to aim at your enemies and fire on them. However, when you’re trying to do this, you also have to dodge incoming bullets, but the control seems to keep you from getting any accurate firing on your enemies! This will become a problem for gamers who are used to having precision control, because this game simply does not have that.

-The Visuals-

Another one of the biggest disappointments is the fact that the visuals here just aren’t up to par with any of the action adventure games that you might play. The enemies are aren’t lacking any sort of detail, but they do seem to be missing key elements like realistic movement. Even your own character is lacking any real movement to him and you may find yourself blinking at the screen because everything just seems to moving very slowly or out of proportion. Explosions and other effects are also kept to a minimum with no shadowing effects or anything else, so be prepared to having little to watch or look at.

-The Audio-

The audio that you find here is also lacking, considering that there is only one main theme that plays throughout the game. Though it tries to instill the feeling of action in the game, you may find that it is just too subtle and too quiet to really get anywhere in your head. The sound effects also seem to run the same way, with small yells and screams marking your kills and the tinny explosions and gunfire blaring through the speakers. Overall, the audio here is lacking, just as the visuals and the control seem to be!

-The Verdict-

Cabal for the Amiga is a good game if you’re looking to play an action game that is a little different than the normal presentation. The game play is intense for the most part, although some gamers might find that playing from the behind the character perspective is a little tough to deal with. The visuals are somewhat better than it’s other counterparts, though the audio has some difficulty keeping up with the game. Control is another issue that seems to have a bit of tweaking issues, but aside from that, it isn’t a bad game. Well worth a couple of bucks or an emulation, Cabal is worthy of a couple of hours of your gaming time.



Reviewer's Score: 7/10 | Originally Posted: 10/01/02, Updated 10/01/02

For reasons unknown the Amiga and Atari ST versions do not have the original level 2, with the scuba divers and a submarine end boss. Instead it skips to the harbour docks level, calling it level 2. Due to this missing level, there only are 4 levels in total.