A long time ago, I was lucky enough to review Hotline Miami. It was a brilliant game, so it really disappointed me knowing that most people would probably never play it due to the gruesome gore factor. It was a simple idea, executed very well, that never over stayed its welcome, nor did it under perform in any regard. Since Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number was looking to be even more controversial, so you can understand my delight then that LA Cops was announced.
Not only would it feature the same sort of hard hitting twin-stick shooting and great use of isometric camera angles, but it’d factor in a bit more of an XCOM-lite element with you controlling multiple police officers in the Miami Vice-esque shoot outs. While still being a mature game, LA Cops doesn’t make you watch as the protagonist beat someone’s head into a pile of meat; in fact there are a number of comedic moments and brief comedy skit cutscenes parodying old cop shows and movies. In fact, your first mission outside of the tutorial is to stop some crooks from holding up a donut shop.
There are a lot of things to like in LA Cops. The shooting emphasizes a unique aiming style where you go by not only your line of sight but also the indicator. This lets you pull off far reaching shots before your enemies even know you’re in the room, and emphasizes short bursts for full-auto weapons. The brighter color palette and low detail aesthetic benefits the camera perspective, plus there’s enough variety that it never hits Lovely Planet levels of grating brightness. There’s a much cooler, calmer tone here to the visuals that makes it feel like even the art direction’s on a slow burn, but ready to pop at any minute. Once guns start firing, you’ll be glad for the clean visuals keeping you prioritizing every enemy. If you’re lucky, you spot one or two busy looking out a window, and you can handcuff them for a huge score bonus.
Level layouts favor multiple routes depending upon what weapons and stats you’ve unlocked for your officers as well. A long hallway works great if you have pistols/rifles and low health + high speed, or you could buff an officer into a tank and have them run around with a shotgun. Or if you just want to see how fast you can blaze through, you can save up, by a grenade launcher (yes, really), and blast apart entire rooms with a single well-placed shot. The variety is not there in the levels themselves, but in the gameplay options.
The grind to unlock most upgrades is small, save for such items as the launcher, but it also emphasizes prioritizing what to put upgrades into first. You might be able to get a super cop who has all max stats eventually, but a single stat can take five to six missions just to upgrade, and you’d have to be excluding the rest of the department in the process. Even by focusing on upgrading my two favorites, Kowalski and Murphy, I barely got them to high in most stats, save for turning Kowalski into a bullet sponge (in that he doesn’t die after being shot twice).
You’ll want to take out more than just your favorites though. Even this early into the game’s Early Access state, the majority of the cast is voiced, and all deliver “perfect” horrible 70s/80s B-movie cheese and one-liners. When your boss is angry, he grumbles like Charlie Brown’s teacher at the beginning of the mission. When the cutscenes play out, “drama” unfolds, from sexism (and Murphy’s insistent fighting against it) in the workplace to Green’s dubious state of being a legit cop or a man too deep. All the while though, the cast is actually surprisingly varied. Murphy may be the only current female officer, but she’s also one of the two African-American cops, along with Borland. Katsuo’s Asian, and Kowalski may or may not be Hispanic.
This means, at most, there are only three white men in the precinct — four if you count the Chief Mahoney. It’s nice to see this kind of diversity, and that the characters aren’t just insensitive cliches. The characters, however silly they may be, just inhabit their own personae. I was actually expecting something more parody-like of ‘spolitation films, but if anything, the game seems set in a world where racial issues aren’t seemingly a problem. Even most of the enemies you fight are white gangsters and hitmen, instead of most crime-centric games favoring ethnic stereotypes. Good on you, Modern Dream. Good on you.
The added ability to tilt your camera perspective left and right also greatly increases your chances of spotting enemies in the next room, in addition to knowing where to position your AI controlled partner in case a criminal tries to flank you. The ability to bring two officers every mission means you can focus on two different playstyles, along with two lives for every try instead of just one. Unfortunately, this is where the game’s current issues emerge. Your AI partner just isn’t that useful. You can have them hang around a doorway but they often have a delayed response, and aren’t nearly as accurate as you are.
Instead of making your teammate behave intelligently or giving a command wheel ala The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, the developer has favored instead making the game be more or less the original Syndicate, but without any clear way to control both cops at once. There are a number of alternatives that could be done with this, from making a Transistor-style planning mode for your officers to the possibilities I list above, but instead the current option is very limited. Being able to tell your partner to go to a place you’re pointing is nice, but during a gun fight, you need to be aiming at enemies, not trying to order someone else in real time.
The other major issue is simply that the game doesn’t have a lot of content as of yet. I burned through the first five missions in about two hours. While the game is clear in stating its currently limited mission count, and it is an Early Access title, it makes it harder to play for longer periods. Just before I wrote this preview, I played through all the missions again, some of them three times. After having beaten them previously, I got some done in a few minutes. This is understandable, as Hotline Miami was in a similar situation, but it also makes me yearn for something more. A level editor with Steam Workshop support, a random level generator, or even just different difficulty settings — these would be wonderful additions Modern Dream should consider at this stage. If the community can produce great maps or the game can constantly offering something new, then the replayability can skyrocket. With such personality and simple core mechanics, I could see either method working.
I want to have an excuse to play LA Cops again. It hits all the same notes as Hotline Miami, but with a little more strategy and risk/reward thanks to the arrest mechanic and having a second cop for back up. It could have just been a rip-off under a technicolor skin, but Modern Dream went above and beyond the call of duty here. While it might not please everyone due to such small an offering so far, the developers have been prompt in the forums — I can confirm some of the changes suggested by players have already been incorporated into the design. It might not have the depth of Darkwood nor the content variation of Crawl, but LA Cops is another solid Early Access game.
This preview was conducted with a copy provided by the developer.