Are you looking for a fast paced, neon filled, futuristic twin stick shooter? Then AIPD could be for you. Artificial Intelligence Police Department (AIPD) puts you in control of a brightly coloured ship, in order to defeat other brightly coloured enemies in a space environment. If you’re looking for some other sort of story or meaning to be there, and shooting things, you’ll be looking for a while, because that’s about the whole amount of story you’ll be getting. You shoot until you can shoot no more.
AIPD feels very much like an old school arcade game. Survive as long as possible, while trying to get the highest score you can to top the leader board. Thankfully, there are some options to alter the game and how it plays, but in all honesty they will do very little in terms of prolonging your time with it. Your ship is customisable, allowing for different weapon loadouts and ship abilities. Each weapons having a different effect, and overheat times, and ship abilities ranging from improved shields, to quicker speed. New customisation options are unlocked as you build your overall total score, but it doesn’t take too long to unlock everything. I found combining a decent weapon, with the ability which reduces cooldown time to be the most effective combination for me, because as long as you’re able to react quickly to enemies and weapons around you, you’re able to dodge damage. Otherwise I may have leant towards the increased shield ability.
Within an hour I found myself in the top 100 in the world rankings. But after that I didn’t feel any need to better myself. A top 100 rank for me feels like an achievement in itself, even if the game won’t have a triple-A title number of adopters. There doesn’t even feel like a need or reason to increase the difficulty with different game scenarios or difficulty as there was seemingly no reward in the form of score multipliers for doing so, just a greater challenge. I’m more than happy to challenge myself in a game, but with nothing greater to show for it at the end it all seems fairly pointless.
Things get fairly hectic on screen the more waves you survive, and adding in each post wave challenge as you go (these are no optional, just a choice between two). And with everything represented in glowing neon orange and purple it can become a mess of colours. And local co-op doesn’t do much to help matters. I always like that a game is willing to include a local co-op mode but AIPD really does start to turn into a mess. There is a constant ask of ‘which one am I’ as soon as the chaos starts, and with thin outlines around the ships it can be difficult to tell at times. What makes things more difficult is the camera struggling to track each ship if they move too far apart. This was an issue with just two people playing, what it’d be like with 4 I’d no like to know.
AIPD is a quick pick up and play game. I’ve only had two hours on it total due to the fairly short bursts it is played in and I’ve managed to unlock everything and do everything I’d want to do with it. While I enjoyed my time with it at the beginning the lack of any kind of objective and no encouragement for the game for me to bother carry on playing leads me to not being able to recommend it. If you are a twin stick shooter fan, that wants a game to pick up and play that gets influence from older arcade title, there may be something here for you.
**Thank you to XCN for the opportunity to review this game**