Watchtower Amiga retrospective: the Finnish commando style shooter time forgot

By the time Watchtower marched onto the Amiga in 1996, the machine had already seen better days. Commodore was gone, the magazines were getting thinner, and many players had started drifting toward PlayStations, PCs and anything capable of throwing a few wobbly polygons around the screen. The Amiga was not dead, exactly, but it was definitely sitting in the corner of the party asking if anyone still remembered Deluxe Paint. Into this atmosphere came CyberArts, a Finnish development team with a refreshingly direct idea: make a loud, fast, top-down arcade shooter in the tradition of Commando and Ikari Warriors, fill it with weapons, enemies and explosions, and remind Amiga owners that their machine could still kick up a respectable amount of smoke. Watchtower was released for AGA Amigas and published by OTM Publications & Promotions. It was a run-and-gun war game viewed from above, built around a simple and very arcade-friendly rhythm: move forward, shoot everything, collect weapons, blow up anything that looks even slightly suspicious, and try not to get turned into a stain before the end of the level. You play as a mercenary sent into various global warzones, which is a polite way of saying that one man is apparently expected to solve complex international conflicts by walking upwards and firing a machine gun continuously. It is not a game interested in diplomacy. There are no peace talks, no political negotiations, and no emotional monologues about the cost of violence. There are crates, flamethrowers, tanks, enemy soldiers and explosions. That is the entire foreign policy.

The people behind Watchtower clearly understood the type of game they were making. Robert Nordin handled the programming, Mika M. K. Laamanen was credited as producer and designer, Kai Sainio worked on the graphics, Henrik Jarolf contributed player imagery, Dan Bjon created the music, and TNT Sound Factory provided the sound effects. It was the kind of small-team production that defined much of the late Amiga scene: focused, handmade, technically ambitious in places, and obviously built by people who had grown up with arcade action in their blood. Contemporary coverage suggested the game took roughly a year and a half to make, and that time shows in its scale. Watchtower was not some tiny throwaway shooter shoved out to catch the last few Amiga buyers. It had six sizeable missions, simultaneous two-player action, multiple weapons, difficulty settings, ranks, money, bosses, destructible objects and enough military hardware to make the local army surplus shop nervous. Its biggest selling point was not subtlety. It was spectacle. Watchtower loved explosions in the way some people love poetry. Barrels erupted, vehicles burst apart, enemy installations went up in flames, and the screen frequently became a cheerful festival of smoke, fire and flying debris. Several reviewers at the time singled out the explosion effects as one of the game’s strongest features, and it is easy to understand why. On a standard Amiga 1200, Watchtower could look impressively busy. The screen filled with soldiers, bullets, bonuses and blasts, yet the game often kept moving with a confidence that reminded players the Amiga still had some muscle left. It may not have had the glamour of the new 3D machines, but it could still throw a very satisfying tantrum.

The game also made much more sense in two-player mode. Like many old-school shooters, Watchtower became instantly better when a friend joined in, partly because the screen became more chaotic and partly because nothing tests a friendship like watching someone “accidentally” grab the weapon crate you were clearly walking toward. In solo play, it could feel repetitive. With two players, that repetition became a shared disaster, and shared disasters are often where arcade games shine. One player gets the machine gun, the other gets surrounded, someone shouts, someone dies, and then both players blame the controls. This is the natural circle of life. But Watchtower had a serious problem, and that problem was called 1996. Had the game arrived four or five years earlier, it might have been received as a strong, muscular Amiga arcade shooter. In 1996, however, it felt like a soldier reporting for duty after the war had already moved to another continent. The wider games industry had shifted. The PlayStation was changing expectations, PC gaming was expanding rapidly, and even loyal Amiga owners were starting to realise that commercial support for their beloved machine was fading. Watchtower was trying to sell old-school arcade thrills at a time when the market was increasingly obsessed with 3D graphics, CD audio, cinematic intros and games that used the word “immersive” with a straight face.

That timing shaped the reviews. Critics were divided. Some praised the speed, the visual effects, the two-player action and the sheer amount of content. Others were much less forgiving, pointing out that the basic formula felt dated, the controls could be awkward, and the action did not evolve enough over time. Both sides had a point. Watchtower was energetic and well made in several respects, but it was also very traditional. You shoot soldiers, then more soldiers, then some different soldiers who appear to have graduated from the same “run directly into bullets” training academy. It is a game of forward motion, constant fire and repeated enemy patterns. If you love that sort of thing, it delivers. If you want variety, strategy or elegance, Watchtower may start to feel like being trapped in a military-themed treadmill. The controls were one of the more divisive elements. In games like this, movement and firing need to feel almost invisible, as natural as breathing or blaming your joystick. When that rhythm is even slightly off, frustration creeps in quickly. Some reviewers found Watchtower clumsy compared with slicker Amiga action games such as The Chaos Engine, Cannon Fodder or Banshee. Those comparisons were not always fair, but they were inevitable. By 1996, Amiga players had already seen some extremely polished top-down action games, and Watchtower had to compete not only with new machines but with the Amiga’s own impressive back catalogue. That is a tough crowd. The Amiga library did not hand out compliments just because you remembered to bring explosions.

Commercially, Watchtower does not seem to have become a major success. It arrived too late, from a small publisher, into a market that was shrinking fast. There is no strong evidence that it sold in large numbers or became a breakout hit. It was noticed, reviewed, debated and then gradually pushed into the strange half-light where many late Amiga games ended up: remembered fondly by some, dismissed by others, and rediscovered years later by people who enjoy digging through the platform’s final commercial years. A CD32 version was reportedly planned but never officially released, which feels painfully appropriate. Even the Amiga’s console cousin could not catch a break. Yet Watchtower deserves more than a shrug. It is not an all-time classic, but it is not a lazy game either. There is craft here. There is enthusiasm. There is a sense that CyberArts wanted to make something big, loud and satisfying for a community that still cared. In that sense, Watchtower belongs to a very particular category of late Amiga release: games made not because the market was healthy, but because someone still believed the machine was worth developing for. That gives it a certain charm. It feels like a defiant little firework at the end of a long show. Maybe not the grand finale everyone hoped for, but still bright enough to notice.

Looking back now, Watchtower is most interesting as a time capsule. It captures both the strengths and the struggles of late-era Amiga gaming. On one hand, it shows what talented small teams could still squeeze from the hardware: colourful graphics, busy screens, strong effects, fast arcade action and proper two-player chaos. On the other hand, it shows how difficult it had become to impress players with a formula that would have seemed much fresher earlier in the decade. Watchtower was not behind because it was badly made. It was behind because the industry had sprinted forward, stolen the jeep, and left it running after them with a rocket launcher. That is the odd sadness of the game. It is easy to imagine a younger Watchtower doing better in an earlier Amiga world. In 1991 or 1992, it might have felt like a serious contender in the arcade-action field. In 1996, it felt like a throwback, and not everyone was in the mood for nostalgia yet. Nostalgia usually needs a little time to become fashionable. Arrive too early and people call you outdated. Arrive later and suddenly everyone says you have “retro charm.” Timing is everything, even when you have a flamethrower.

Today, Watchtower is worth revisiting not as a lost masterpiece, but as a loud, sincere and technically interesting shooter from the Amiga’s twilight years. It has flaws, certainly. It can be repetitive. It can be awkward. It sometimes feels like it is trying to win a modern argument with an old arcade vocabulary. But it also has personality, pace and a stubborn refusal to go quietly. It is the kind of game that kicks open the door, fires in all directions, trips over the furniture, and somehow still makes you smile. Watchtower did not save the Amiga. No single game could have done that by 1996, unless it came bundled with a new parent company, a global marketing budget and possibly a small miracle. But it did prove that developers were still willing to fight for the platform, even when the battlefield was almost empty. It was a late arrival, yes, and not always a graceful one. But it came armed, it came loud, and it brought enough explosions to make sure nobody missed it completely. In the end, Watchtower is best understood as a brave, noisy footnote from the Amiga’s final commercial chapter. It was not The Chaos Engine. It was not Cannon Fodder. It was not Banshee. It was Watchtower: a Finnish-made arcade war game that turned up late, fired everything it had, and left the screen burning behind it. For some players, that was not enough. For others, especially those who still love the smell of pixelated napalm in the morning, it remains exactly the kind of flawed, fiery Amiga oddity worth remembering.

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