Beat Cop lets us be a cop in the eighties who has to clear his name. Pixelated graphics and some humor come together in an adventure that has too many details to polish and a lot to improve but with charm.
One of the many dreams of children is to be a police officer when they grow up. Enforcing the law, hunting down criminals, and making sure everyone is safe is the closest thing to feeling like a superhero in real life. But in reality they end up dealing with misdemeanor distress calls and patrolling the city while issuing fines in the vast majority of cases.
Police movies have greatly sweetened the vision of the common police that we see on the street. This is the inspiration that Beat Cop has taken to capture the routine of a policeman, mixed with drama and humor to create a story that justifies us following day by day. We play a policeman who, like the movie that Homer Simpson made up when the Movimientarios put a video on him to brainwash him, the Internal Affairs men set him up. They accuse him of a murder and a theft of jewelry that he did not commit, and he only has 21 days to clear his name while paying alimony to his wife by patrolling a troubled street with the mafia and criminal gang in between . And everyone is going to want the influence of a policeman.
From day one they show us that our main job is to raise money for the public coffers through fines. They will ask us almost every day for a number of fines to look good. An expired parkmeter, parking in front of a fire hydrant or in a ford, driving with damaged wheels or with a broken headlight is a fine and calling the tow truck. An interesting mechanic but that will be automatic only in the case of parking fines because checking headlights and wheels is extremely slow and we will only do it to meet the quota. Some passersby will ask us please not to fine them and will try to bribe us and here begins a mechanic that is interesting but it is difficult to notice the differences and that encourages the player. If we forgive fines, people will like us, but if we put a lot on our fellow police officers, they will like us better. We will also have to do favors for our superiors by playing the ball with the mayor's mother.
The gangsters and members of the gang will also ask us for favors, that we be messengers or do their dirty work because nobody distrusts a policeman and they will like us more or less depending on what we do. The idea of various factions within such a small setting being a cop is interesting but it takes a long time to show its repercussions. We will get money for when they ask us for alimony or buy drugs to improve our energy and be able to run longer. A lot of micromanagement of the money that in the end ends up being left over unless we want to achieve an anticlimactic ending in which we escape to Mexico.
Sometimes we will have to decide whether to help the gangsters at the pizzeria or the gang that steals televisions and sells them at the pawnshop. At most, if we are very extreme in the final part of the game or the gang or the mafia will give us a beating that will leave us incapacitated for half an hour but nothing more. In a game we are not going to see what happens if the policemen don't like us and the logical thing is to do our job unless the role-playing game of being a maximum corrupt is very important.
All this while managing time, from nine in the morning to six in the afternoon. There will be events and objectives that we can miss as happened in Dead Rising of The Last Express that make the street alive. All of Beat Cop's businesses have characters who will call us for mafia extortions or robberies, or they will ask us for favors that sweeten the day to day. Some of those will be vital to get the game's good ending.
It is a good way to tell the story and weave it together with how stressful it is to be a policeman in the service of gangs and superiors who can make your life impossible. But it is very wasted because almost no one will want to go to help gangsters or gang members who traffic drugs when they tell us that we are a policeman. At least in the first game and if it is done it would be to try what the game offers. Come on, that does not encourage going outside the law other than feeling that we are corrupt policemen.
And we talk a lot about the decisions and management of the time and energy of the character because there is not much more to say. It does not have complicated mechanics beyond visiting premises or certain floors when asked for a mission. Here lies an interesting mechanic which is that there is no map and if they tell us to go to the sex shop quickly we will have to know where it is. Also memorizing numbers and floors of the streets to look for someone, although many times they specify it in the game's notepad. Occasionally there will be a shooting in which we can die but it is so simple that it is worth pressing the button when the cursor passes through our objective. Mechanically; Beat Cop is not an overly interesting game and all the appeal goes to the metagame of playing a cop and little else. The story is not overly interesting and it is easy to lose the thread.
And the Beat Cop presentation is not particularly flattering. The street we patrol is well built and has a certain touch of realism to have numerous shops. Although then we find the character designs that seem made in bulk and without personality. No character has identifying traits other than our protagonist, the same sprites of the bands, passers-by are reused a lot ... There even comes a time when that of a character who dies on the first day of the game is repeated. Of course, the graphic style of characters with so few pixels does not allow much, but a little more variety or making characters bigger and with them giving them more possibilities would be appreciated.
Beat Cop is an interesting game, and with good ideas and concept. It works more like good curiosity and game than playing when there is nothing else to play. It's hard to recommend it unless someone is very interested in the idea. It does not enter through the eyes, and it does not stay much because of how it is played or because of its history. It is not heavy and meets the basics and little else. It is not that we did not like it, it is that except for some situations throughout the 21 days of play, it was not very interesting or rewarding to play outside the story and feeling of being a police officer. You will have your audience that you love but it is a small one and it will be difficult to find it.
