I recently finished playing Hong Kong Massacre. While making the purchase other games were suggested to me, including Beat Cop. A pixelated point-and-click adventure about being a beat cop. It seemed like an interesting game and thought why not give it a go.
I like doughnuts. Some admittedly are a lot better than others. Donuts have become the latest food trend, along with burritos, in Cork city (where I live). There are tons of donut shops, which all offer delicious looking donuts with creative fillings, but a lot of them fall short of expectation, being a bit dry or made from mediocre dough. However, for any doughnut lovers reading this you know it takes something special to make a truly tasty doughnut. Playing Beat Cop I found myself asking was it enough to be considered a tasty doughnut?
Story
The storytelling mechanic is interesting and perhaps even unique. The game offers you a quick set of storyboards that set the premise for the game. However, if you miss this somehow and want to know the entire idea of the game including the story just listen to the track 'It's Gonna Change The Game'. The game is set in the eighties and you take on the role of Detective Jack Kelly, he is called to a Senator's house to stop a robbery, however, things go awry. Kelly is quickly demoted to a beat cop after being suspected of the theft. It sounds interesting, right? It is but starts to falter from this point onwards. The game has you deal with the mundanity of your day to day duties, keeping the peace with the people including people, store owners, and local gangs. Unfortunately, it loses sight of the main story, it jumps in and out of it and can be easy to miss certain parts.
Overall the idea is interesting but is not executed very well. The game has multiple endings none of which left me feeling satisfied. When I tried to complete my final day I was unable to do anything which essentially meant I had to be a beat cop until the end of my days. I feel the story could have been a lot stronger if it decided to focus either on the main story or being a beat cop, as overall it is not very well balanced.
Visuals
I love the visuals in the game! I'm always amazed when a pixelated game manages to have so much detail in it. There is graffiti on the walls, there are fumes from traffic, the walls of buildings look beaten up. Easily the strongest part of the game is the visuals it provides. They manage to be fun, quirky and gritty. It feels like a living world, which for a pixelated game is quite impressive.
Overall the visuals are amazing and help create an impressive world, even if it is only one street.
Music
The score is a blend of Beastie Boys, cop show music and old retro games from the eighties and nineties. The score was composed by Piotr Musial, who works include Witcher 3, This War of Mine and one of my favorite games of last year Frost Punk. Working along with Musial are composers Patryk Grzeszczuk and William Bradford
The score comes in at around twenty minutes long and features a handful of tracks. My favorites being, 'Beat Cop Theme', 'Corpus Delicti' and 'Get Even'. Overall the soundtrack isn't especially amazing but certainly isn't the worst.
Gameplay
Beat Cop is a pixelated point-and-click game. The gameplay is a bit of a mixed bag, in a similar way to the story itself. Each day you will get a briefing as to what you need to achieve that day. Some days are okay, others are a bit more awkward. For example, you might need to write ten parking tickets, other days you might have to write five tickets for broken lights, four for damaged tires and get half of them towed. This is not to mention you will have to deal with requests from people. There is also having to deal with gang requests, you can ignore them or help them, no matter what you do something will have to be sacrificed. Time management is key.
One review I read was fairly negative and disapproved of the game for its amount of language, racism, and general bigotry. It is important to remember this game was set in the eighties where much of this did in fact exist. It doesn't mean it was right but it can't be ignored either. I don't think the aim of the studio was to be political, but simply to highlight how some things were and to a degree still are now.
The beat you have is just one street, but with so much happening that is more than enough. One of the biggest things you will do is write tickets, which is pretty mundane and can take time. Playing you have the choice of writing up false tickets to hit your quota, and even take bribes to turn a blind eye, sometimes you will get away with it other times it affects your pay packet. The gang requests I feel are some of the toughest because it is difficult to toe the line and keep everyone happy. I never got the gangs to completely hate me fully if I had I think it would have been detrimental to my health.
I did have a number of issues with the gameplay. If a robbery occurred at the Hi-Fi Store ninety percent of the time they would get away. This is due to it being right at the end of your beat and the thief would run off screen straight away. Occasionally the game would glitch not registering what I had done, or halfway through one day all the parked disappeared and I couldn't hit my ticket quota. Eating can help restore your stamina but I felt it was unnecessary as I never saw any improvement. Some days are almost carbon copies of each other making it feel like a bit of a slog at times.
Overall there are some interesting elements to the gameplay but similar to the story it seems to spend too much having you write tickets and not enough time working on things that matter.
Final Thoughts
After ten hours of playing how did I feel? Meh. The game has potential but both story and gameplay need a bit of work. The visuals are great, and the music is okay. It's not the worst game in the world but never seems to realise its potential. This one scrapes a 3 out of 5
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