Crime Wave is a side-scrolling run-and-gun shooter, developed by The Code Monkeys for Access Software and first published in 1990. It is reminiscent of the 1989 arcade game, Narc, and could in fact be described as a clone of that game.

Crime Wave uses digitized graphics to tell the story of law enforcement officer, Luke McCabe, on the trail of the President’s kidnapped daughter, who is being held by the sinister forces of the “King Pin“. Frankly, the story in Crime Wave is badly-told, very clichéd, and laughably-presented, and that’s without factoring in the many grammatical errors in the somewhat amateurish comic book style cut scenes.

The action itself is also pretty bad. As Luke, you can shoot various different types of weapons, from machine guns to rocket-launchers, which will send the limbs of the bad guys flying in all directions. Luke can duck and jump, to avoid enemy fire, and must pick up dropped ammo to keep his guns firing.

A health bar on the left side of the screen shows how close to death he is. Picking up life potions will top this up. The right side of the screen shows ammo levels, and also any drugs, or wads of cash, he’s confiscated from criminals.

The play window in Crime Wave is small, and the scrolling is slow, and not what I would call smooth. The screen surround is supposed to be the criminals, in their headquarters, watching McCabe on a big screen, which is kinda funny. The all-important gameplay is poor, though, as are the graphics overall.

Crime Wave was also released for PC MS-DOS and Amiga, and it is a low point for Access Software, who were generally renowned for their high quality releases, before this. Thankfully, though, Crime Wave didn’t bring the company down, and it continued to make games well into the 2000s.

More: Crime Wave on Moby Games
More: Access Software on Wikipedia