LA Cops Review
It’s tricky to write a review about a cop game without resorting to any one of the thousands of top quality puns out there. Do I call the game a total cop out? Do I say they’ve made a real pigs ear of the game? Maybe I should just stop (in the name of the law) while I’m ahead? In truth though LA Cops is probably not worth wasting your best police jokes on, which is why I chose to use all of those awful ones. Honest.
The game is an iso-metric shooter, with each of the thirteen levels taking place in rather open plan buildings that are full of nefarious criminals. Your job is simply to either arrest or kill as many of these naughty fellows as possible, with the game giving you a rating at the end of each based on how well you did. It plays that a less well thought out version of Hotline Miami and has a bunch of frustrating issues that stop it from being fun for much more than an hour or so.
To start with the game is often brutally hard and unfair. You can choose two out of six cops to take on missions, then use the experience you get at the end of levels to upgrade their skills. In the early stages, even on the lowest difficulty, one shot is almost always fatal. Levels do have extra health in the form of donuts and first aid kits so you can revive your partner, but as they are randomly placed they can’t really be relied one especially when it comes to the longer levels with a ton of villains.
You’re not helped by the completely random nature of the A.I. as well. Enter a room while a criminal has their back turned and you can sneak up and arrest him, well, sometimes you can. You see sometimes they just magically know you are there, spin around and kill you before you know what’s happened. Likewise you can gun down a guy two feet away from someone else and no one will react. Or you can gun him down, and everyone in the next three rooms will suddenly rush towards you leading to a grizzly death. It seems completely arbitrary when it comes to what the enemy A.I. will and won’t notice, and as a result your progress can be halted in the blink of an eye.
To help you even the odds you have two cops at your disposal, you can guide your partner by aiming at the spot you want them to head to and pressing a button. Easy. However, the route they take to get there is a bit random and they may end up facing the wrong way when they stop. So in theory you can both bust into a room and clear it of bad guys, but in practice your partner will burst in, facing the wrong way and shoot at no one until you are dead. Even popping your partner in a corner and luring foes towards them doesn’t always work, as they only decide to open fire sporadically. At which point you have died in a hail of bullets while cursing their name.
All of these problems are amplified when you jack up the difficulty, as you die so fast and have to face so many well equipped enemies that it comes more down to luck, rather than skill, when you clear an area. Not to mention the fact the moderately helpful lock on feature is taken away and the controls never seem precise enough to aim at enemies manually. Plus in the later levels an annoying timed element is added to proceedings so you now have to kill ALL enemies and rescue someone or else its back to the start. Whoever thought that was a good idea should be put in cuffs themselves.
On the plus side the game is simple to pick up and play, the graphics are bright and breezy and the music is a wonderful 1970’s vibe that really helps to set the mood. The story is not really much of anything, and is played it in short vividly coloured cutscenes, but it helps to segue between the action and can be moderately amusing at times. However, for all the inherent charm the game falls down when it comes to the action and you’ll probably be able to blow through most of the content in a few hours, with the only option left then to try the harder difficulties or aim to climb the score based leaderboards.
LA Cops is diverting for an hour or so, but after that it rapidly gets frustrating and you’ll probably find yourself grinding out experience on the earlier levels just to give yourself a chance. After blitzing through the short set of levels you’ll probably be more satisfied that it is finally over than keen to try and beat your high score or the other difficulties. Overall then it’s a bright pastiche of 70’s cops but beneath the surface one that has failed to uphold the highest standards of law enforcement. Send this one to the slammer.