Shock Troopers

About Shock Troopers

Shock Troopers (1997) is Saurus's overhead Neo Geo run and gun in which a squad of mercenaries, alone or as a switchable team of three, fights through branching routes to rescue a kidnapped scientist's granddaughter.

Shock Troopers in Depth

The terrorist group Bloody Scorpions has kidnapped scientist George Diamond and his granddaughter Cecilia to get hold of Alpha-301, a drug that turns ordinary people into superhuman soldiers. A special team of eight soldiers from different countries must fight through their ranks to reach the leader and save the granddaughter and the world, ending in a battle with the enemy commander atop an aircraft. At the start players pick Lonely Wolf, controlling one soldier with twenty units of life, or Team Battle, choosing three soldiers with ten each who can be switched on the fly, which offers a wider variety of special weapons.

Players also choose a Mountain, Jungle or Valley route and can switch to another halfway through, and the characters and paths chosen decide the life bonus received at each level. Each of the seven levels has a mid-boss as well as an end boss. Each soldier has strengths such as more life or more speed, plus a unique special weapon, or bomb, of varying range. An eight-way joystick moves and aims, while four buttons fire, dodge, use the special weapon and switch characters. Holding fire allows strafing, the dodge button avoids enemy fire, and attacking enemies at close range makes them drop items such as points, weapon power-ups and life.

Making Shock Troopers

Saurus developed it for SNK's Neo Geo arcade platform in 1997. It has since been re-released many times, in SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1 for PlayStation 2, PSP and Wii, on the Wii Virtual Console by D4 Enterprise in 2012, in DotEmu's PC version for the Humble NEOGEO 25th Anniversary Bundle in 2015, later on Steam and GOG.com, and in Hamster's ACA Neo Geo series. The game was very well received: Nintendo Life gave the Virtual Console release seven out of ten, saying it "succeeds in offering up an intense and explosive run-and-gun experience", Digitally Downloaded awarded four and a half stars, recommending it to newcomers to the genre, and Hardcore Gaming 101 noted the Virtual Console version "runs almost perfectly", unlike the one in SNK Arcade Classics.