LA Cops Reviews
LA Cops has the feel of a casual game that you can blast through quickly and give your achievement score a quick boost. In some ways, it is a little frustrating as you feel that with a little more fine tuning and the inclusion of multiplayer it could have been a great, fun, little game, but as it is, it falls a little short of that.
Despite exhibiting cool charm and unique aesthetics, LA Cops is ultimately a bland twin-stick shooter that does the bare minimum in gameplay and design. The execution of the mechanics and the AI is inconsistent and seriously dampens the gameplay.
LA Cops is a neat diversion with some fantastic style. I had a blast in the short time I played it, but feel like it grows stale far too fast. This is the perfect game to snag during a sale, it is fun for the time it lasts, I just wish there was more to come back to once the raiding was over.
While there was clear opportunity in the buddy cop formula LA Cops attempted to create, the end result is a mess. Totally undermined by poor teammate AI, the central strategic hook is lost, resulting in a bland game confused about what it wants the player to do.
LA Cops is a neat game of cops and criminals that's just too short-lived and lacking. The 70s style is a nice touch and the partner dynamic adds a strategic bent (even if we did mostly just use the second cop as an extra life) to what is otherwise a fairly sterile twin-stick shooter. It's not quite our bag of donuts.
All things considered, LA Cops is a decent addition to the sub-genre but one that falls short of its initial promise. With more sophisticated AI and a comprehensive partner system in place, this could've been a worthy stablemate for its East Coast cousin. As it stands, it's hard to recommend LA Cops when you can pick up the next slice of Hotline Miami's gory abstraction at a similar price point.
From the vibrant visuals and the pitch perfect 70s cop theme to the fast and snappy buddy cop action, LA Cops has a lot of great ideas, but hasn't really done enough with them. The partner system in particular could have been something unique and special, evocative of classic buddy cop films and TV series, but in the end, I was just gunning down enemies with my backup around the corner.
LA Cops has some cool ideas, but the frustratingly shoddy execution works completely at odds with the experience the game is trying to create.
A good little shooter that could have been great, L.A Cops is like a nicer version of Hotline Miami that's a bit on the blander side.
It certainly doesn't help that the debt to the superb Hotline Miami is so obvious. As I wrestled with the gluey movement and bizarre AI to find the fun in LA Cops, I was painfully aware that I could be having that fun already, in a more stylish and polished form, just by scrolling up my Steam library. As Omar so wisely said in The Wire, you come at the king you best not miss. LA Cops shoots way too wide of the target.