You’re a cop in a big city with lots of bad guys. As your average
"rookie" you are responsible for single handidly taking out every
single bad guy in Union City. You want a storyline, you can go play
Final Fantasy. This isn’t one of those "intelligent" type of games
where actual coherent thoughts are required to complete certain
tasks. Your sole requirements are faint hints of intelligent life, the
ability to bash certain keys very quickly and at consistent rates,
and the ability to stop doing so when not required.
To begin, there are several training courses for general
clambering, combat, and driving cars. All this is presented in a
graphics engine using an odd "eliptoid" method of presenting
characters and all character models are constructed of circles,
although you will be hard pressed to notice this easily while
playing the game. The engine also hosts a cunning method of
fogging known as "Chunks Up Your Computer Really Really
Badly". As soon as this lovely mist starts coming onto the screen,
you will be host to your spectacular computer running at some
pathetically crappy frame rates. That feature aside, the engine is
adequate to display the cities and alleyways.
The combat is much like your average fighting game, except that
you usually engage multiple enemies at once. For anybody who
wants a better representation of combat, take your nearest
keyboard you don’t particularly like, and then bang the arrow keys
and the "z" and "x" button repeatedly. The one irritating thing
here with the cop is that the simplest way to take out dozens of
bad guys is to simply hit the "forward" and "punch" buttons madly
to flip your enemy, and then handcuff them. No baddies ever seem
to interfere while you do this on them one at a time. This really
starts to detract from the gameplay, but admittedly the introduction
of some big guns start to lessen the effectiveness of this dull but
highly effective tactic. The other half of the game involves
clambering, and lots of it. Your objectives are stated at the start in
a short and snappy briefing, and then coloured dots are shown on
your personal little rookie radar. It is sometimes harder than you
would think to reach a certain place, having to search for some
darn, obscured ladder which could be anywhere in a 50 meter
radius about your appointed dot. Clambering about though is the
main tool to be used when trying to find bonuses hidden within a
level. Every level has a certain number of bonuses scattered about
seemingly randomly and requires quite a bit of clambering to find.
These bonuses will increase the statistics of your character.
Then there is the third aspect of the game: driving. Utilizing a
complete and utter lack of physics, your car controls more like a
train on tracks going round the corners as it somehow manages to
go through a tight u-bend at full speed perfectly. No sliding of the
wheels, just zip, and you’ve taken the turn. Your car also seems to
have slightly screwed up braking as tapping the "brake" key, when
going over a certain speed, means your driver goes against all
your guiding of lightly tapping the break and plants her foot on the
brake like there’s no tomorrow, taking your car into a elaborate
hand brake sliding stop. Driving is not really a big feature in the
game though, it does happen at a few key points with a small
variety of vehicles, but its not really one of the game basics.
Well that’s basically all there is to it. It might sound like it would
get a bit repetitive but that’s because it does. Though they have
tried to add some twists to it like being able to control a gangster
and some other mystery man who fits into the…erm…"plot". I
loathe calling it a plot, basically it’s just some silly excuse to beat
lots of people up and lousily carried out through some really
horribly done conversations. But all that is not at stake here, this
game is here so you can run around and beat people up. After all,
it is just *fun*. There’s nothing really special about the title, but if
your looking to spend a while on a nice fun action game that will
keep you busy for a bit, then this is for you.