LA Cops came in as the latest on the production line of ID @Xbox games from Microsoft. As with other ID @ Xbox games what it lacks in overall quality relative to big budget it makes up for in guts and small little anecdotes which give you a smile and a genuine enjoyment to play the game. However LA Cops is just lacking something…
A simple short game, LA Cops comprises of 8 main missions and several secondary missions which involves you playing as LA Police officer attempting to stop a gang in a different setting. Accompanying you in the task is a partner of your choice, there’s 6 to choose from including your own character. None of them are particularly interesting, they don’t come with any bio or background and they all feature a small box which seem to be attributes but this isn’t clearly explained to the player.
After a very short tutorial the game thrusts you into the first mission and with ease you can scale through it with some nifty thinking. Harsh is the world of the police and the same goes for the world of an LA Cop, your partner very rarely helps and often serves as cannon fodder whilst you take out the gang members decapitating your once work colleague. As the game grew on into the latter levels I found myself constantly frustrated with the AI’s lack of ability to help in situations which led to countless deaths. This was on normal difficulty too, which is sort of embarrassing.
Nevertheless, LA Cops never makes the game easy; the map is specifically laid out so that the player can only see the room directly in front of them. More often than not when exploding into a room, literally for the AI as he’s shot to pieces, you find that the room after is full of gang members that fly out of nowhere to cause you more issues.
Here is where the controls come in. A reasonably nifty layout, the AI is response to your call for them to move to a specific spot in the next room, and in theory this is a great idea to add depth to the game creating different scenarios. In reality though, only one scenario features and that’s one of death for all parties involved. The move very rarely works as the gang members are on you in a flash and it takes time for the AI to adjust to entering a room and shooting.
Inevitably though with some many challenges the game turns into a “how many goes will it take to complete this?” style of game. You really have to learn the map by dying over and over again in the later missions to progress and it can become tedious. But with games like this when it all pays off like you want it to it can be very rewarding.
Although featuring 8 main missions, LA Cops doesn’t have a distinctive story along the way, there is the odd cut scene with the funny donut joke but that is about it. But that is the length of the story if you can even call it that alone. Sounds and graphics again are pretty basic and really is representative of the game as a whole, they don’t really add anything to the game at all aside from the odd one liner and it’s a real shame.
The game engine itself runs fairly smoothly but once again these ties into how stupid the AI can be at times, I found myself more distracted by that than some clear flaws in how the game panned out. The sad thing about LA Cops is that with a little humour added in this game could be made bearable at best but fundamental errors really restrict the player and it doesn’t make me want to come back for more.
This review may seem rather short compared to others and that’s because there really isn’t a lot to write about in LA Cops. The missions follow a very similar pattern although the objective may change. The characters are just drawn well enough so that you can see the clear difference in stereotypes that each represents as if something out of an old American police movie. For an ID @ Xbox game this is probably one of the low points in a good genre, but a few tweaks in the AI and some added story LA Cops can pull itself up to a level of respect rather than where it’s at right now.
My thanks to Microsoft and XCN for allowing AbsoluteGaming to review LA Cops, and for their continued support.