Think about Hotline Miami. Got it? Good. Now, change its perspective. No, we don’t want it to be a top-down game anymore. Yep, that’s it. A nice isometric view. Now, take away the ability to properly survey rooms you’ve yet to enter. Nice…because who wants to see that shit, right? Now, couple that with a poorly-implemented lock-on mechanic. Good, good. On top of that, let’s add a second character to have to control. Clearly Hotline Miami was way too easy a game, so let’s double the difficulty by making you look after double the protagonists. Oh…while you’re at it, picture it looking like a browser-based Flash game. Congratulations. Not only have you ruined one of the best indie games of recent years, but you’ve managed to somehow release it as an actual product. For money. That takes some balls. Ok, perhaps I’m being a little harsh, but that’s partly because this was a game that seemed to have real potential. Team 17 were venturing into a brave new world of not publishing a Worms game, and the game itself had a unique style with which to sell itself. However, a publisher of some repute and some fancy cutscenes don’t make a great game on their own, and LA Cops (LA Cops Ltd/Team 17) never even comes close to being a great game. Let’s go back to some of those changes I mentioned earlier and see where it went quite so wrong… A new perspective on things I apologise for comparing this game to Hotline Miami, but you only need to play this game for 30 seconds to recognise its influence. Unfortunately, it also takes just 30 seconds to recognise how much better it does basically everything. Part of the reason it worked was its simplicity, and that began with its top-down view. Whilst it’s understandable that LA Cops would look to do all it could to differentiate from Devolver Digital’s title, sometimes you just have to accept that the original got it right, and that’s clearly proven here. By switching to an isometric view, LA Cops adds a level of complexity to the controls that just doesn’t need to be there (something of a recurring theme with this game, as you’ll soon discover). I can’t see clearly now A lot of LA Cops’ issues are linked and, so, when your enjoyment of the game is already hampered by a dodgy camera angle, it stands to reason that they’d compound that problem by stripping out one of Hotline Miami’s most useful features – the ability to see the entirety of the next room. Whilst Hotline Miami was a quick, visceral game when it needed to be, it also provided scope for plenty of planning. LA Cops does no such thing, meaning you’re often blindly bundling into rooms and hoping your reflexes are quick enough to avoid being one-shotted by an enemy (spoiler alert: they won’t be). Solid as a lock…or not Some of the aforementioned issues could have been mitigated to an extent, if the game had a functional lock-on mechanism. Prepare to be shocked here, but LA Cops doesn’t have a functional lock-on mechanism. Yet again hampered by the game’s camera angle (see?) and lack of scope in what you can see beforehand, the lock-on mechanism is both finicky to use in the first instance and then nigh-on impossible to quickly switch to the next enemy. As a result, the game quickly devolves into a game of hide and seek, as you peek out from behind a door, shoot one, duck back behind said door, wait for the next enemy to appear on screen, peek out again, blah, blah, blah, ad infinitum. Tango & Trash To the credit of LA Cops Ltd, the addition for a second player could have been a masterstroke…if implemented properly. It’s not implemented properly. The potential was there. The idea of having two cops, both strategically placed to cover a room and each other, is a really good one, but only if the controls are intuitive and the AI is solid. Neither of these things is the case, sadly. As a result, the second cop is essentially reduced to acting as a second life in the game, offering you an immediate second chance when you lose your first life. A real opportunity wasted. Flash! Aaaarrrgggghhhh! It’s abysmal! It’s not all bad news for LA Cops. The game’s cutscenes are actually pretty funny and stylish, ribbing as they do on 70s cop shows and the traits inherent with that genre – namely awful jokes, horrendous moustaches, doughnuts and casual sexism (at least…I hope the game is ribbing on those things) – in an almost Beastie Boys Sabotage-esque manner. The writing is sharp, and it works well, especially when coupled with the unique graphical style used in those scenes. However, that style just doesn’t carry across into the game itself. By using a fairly flat palette and a somewhat limited animation style, the game too often looks like the kind of Flash-based game you could play on Friv for free. It’s just the final rotten cherry on top of an incredibly disappointing sundae. This review was based on the Xbox One version of the game.
The post LA Cops – Review appeared first on TheGameJar.
