(Note: My reviews will always attempt to remain as spoiler free as possible.)

What is this game?
Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel is a point-and-click adventure game/police simulation released in 1987 by Sierra. The game, also simply known as Police Quest, was originally created using an AGI engine which utilized text commands but was later remade in 1992 on the SCI engine with updated VGA graphics. This review will cover the 1992 remake. In this game you take on the role of Sonny Bonds, police officer of the Lytton Police Department in California and experience many of his day to day duties.

Things I loved.
The characters are probably the best thing about the game though I admit I feel some of their personalities are similar to the point that I occasionally forget which character is which. The protagonist Sonny has a somewhat vanilla straight-laced personality which could easily cause the character to feel boring but the colorful personalities of the supporting cast work well to offset that. I think my favorite character is Marie Wilkans, a girl Sonny went to high school with. I think she’s quirky and fun but doesn’t feel as though she was put in the game just to be a love interest. Most of the cast is made up of detectives and officers with similar no nonsense personalities but there are some exceptions like hot-headed supervising officer Sergeant Dooley.

There is no voice acting in the game which surprises me a little but that doesn't take away from the game in any way. The music is fun and enjoyable but significantly louder than the sound effects which can be an issue if you are wearing headphones.(This can be adjusted in settings.) The sound effects are well done however, I find myself a little annoyed with the office sounds in the police station fairly quickly.

I really like the look of the game. To me, the pixelated style graphics of that time are still very visually appealing and certainly an upgrade from the original game. I find them charming and pleasant to look at so I was quite pleased with the overall look of the characters and backgrounds.

For the most part the controls are a straightforward point-and-click interface with simple icons that are easy to switch between and allow for obvious actions. Very easy to utilize.

Things I Found Frustrating.
Progressing through the game doesn’t always feel very fluid or natural. Since the overall story is pretty simplistic there isn't always a clear path to follow. Sometimes you just need to drive around until you find someone to pull over or wait for orders from one of your superiors. There is often no real method or direction to what you are meant to do until closer to the end of the game.

Part of the above issue is due to the story taking a little while to get going. In the beginning it’s difficult to see a connection between what you’re doing and the “endgame” of apprehending the Death Angel. Sometimes there is no connection at all like when you pull over the speeder or the drunk driver. And even the events that do have a connection to the Death Angel shouldn’t ultimately concern your character at first because they aren’t in the narcotics department. It’s all just going about your day as a traffic cop. (Which, as a police simulation, arguably is the point of the game.) It took me three tries to actually play through the entire game and that's because I was determined to finish it, not necessarily because I wanted to see what happened. With the King's Quest games, for example, you tend to have very specific goals right from the start. (KQ1 you're trying to find the three treasures, etc.) Police Quest doesn't really have that. They mention something about a stolen car at the beginning that you’re supposed to keep an eye out for and there are other very small kernals but you don’t really get into the meat of the story until you’re already halfway through the game. There’s also no real reason to transfer to the narcotics unit aside from the fact that one character mentions you should and it’s an adventure game so you won’t progress any further until you do. I didn’t know if that was something my character had any interest so I didn't understand my motivation in doing that. Since you don't necessarily always have something you're supposed to be doing or a goal your working on, you spend a lot of time just driving around or wandering and talking to people aimlessly. (Which I guess is generally inevitable when playing adventure games.) To me, “In Pursuit of the Death Angel” is a misleading title since it never really feels like you’re following clues or any sort of trail to find Death Angel. You just keep being presented with situations you have to resolve. Things happen that suggest the stakes are high or that the stakes are increasing but it's difficult to see a clear connection to how those events link to the main goal of catching "Death Angel."

The reliance on you as the player knowing police procedure is borderline unfair, making the game almost unplayable at certain points in my opinion. An example with a minor spoiler is when you make an arrest and bring them to jail you are supposed to put your gun in a locker outside. There is literally nothing in the game or manual that explains this or why you need to do it. (If there is I can’t find it and I reread the manual just before writing this.) Just to test it, I didn't put my gun in the locker. I assumed the person I arrested would grab my gun and turn it on me and I would be given a "death" message to be more careful about locking up my weapon or something to indicate what I had done wrong. That didn't happen. My character just turned his back to the other guy for no reason and the other guy hit my character over the head. No indication that it was because I didn't lock up my gun. If they were going to expect a player to know so much about police procedure that should have all been clearly included in the manual or the characters in the game should give us that information somehow.

You 100% need the manual to even get started in this game. In one playthrough I started previously, I got to the locker room but couldn't figure out how to open my locker. My character would tell me that he remembered the combination being the same as the score of a sports game in The Gazette so I thought I needed to find a newspaper somewhere in the police station. I tried to exit the locker room but the game wouldn't let me and I thought I had missed something right away that caused me to get stuck. Turns out “The Gazette” you need is in the manual, not in the game. I didn’t even find the “score” in the manual until long after I completed the game and was rereading the manual for the purposes of this review. I originally found the locker combination in the New Cadets section which I discovered after skimming the manual for (and not finding) the sports score to reference. The manual also contains tons of useful information like how to handle the various perpetrators you pull over and a map of Lytton that greatly helps in traversing the city. You can actually see what streets are where/in which quadrant and even some of the buildings are labeled to more quickly identify them rather than having to click on each place in game to see what they are. Additionally after you make an arrest you have to input codes, again located in the manual, that relate to a given offense. You have to input all that are relevant or you won't get all the points(and the arrest might not stick) which is hard because which ones you need can be unclear. You could probably just enter every single code to check it out but the task would probably be as tedious as it sounds. On one hand it’s kinda fun to have the manual to look through. Makes it feel like you’re really “doing the work” so to speak. On the other hand it’s annoying to have to have the manual sitting in your lap or open on your PC in order to reference it, which you need to do often. But requiring the manual is understandable as this was a form of copy protection and was quite common at the time these types games were made. I unfortunately missed a lot of the information in the manual and therefore had more trouble than I might have if I had taken the time to indepthly read through the whole thing. That is more on me than the game but I wrongly assumed I had read enough of the manual that I knew the relevant parts.

I hate the driving interface. You often have to use a vehicle to drive to different locations in town. I absolutely dread the driving portions of the game. It seems really intuitive when you first start driving. You have blinkers and a siren and it shows your car's location around town. But after that things just get redundant really fast: Turning the correct way can be confusing based on which direction your car is moving on the map. If you miss the entrance to a building you can't back up, instead you have to go around the block or a couple of blocks which takes forever espcially when you keep having to stop. Often there is a dispatcher of some sort urging your character to hurry to the location probably as a reminder of where you’re supposed to go, but when you already know and you keep having to circle the block because of the driving mehanic, this can merely add to frustration rather than be helpful. If you don't put your blinker on soon enough you can miss your turn. If you don't have a blinker on and hit a dead end your car will chose a direction for you which may not be the direction you want to go. If you try to approach the police station entrance from the right side it seems the car will turn south so then you have to go all the way around to approach the building from the left. The list goes on. And you have to drive so much that you’re constantly having to deal with the interface. Also I kept having to reload the game because I would miss people I was supposed to pull over since it isn’t made completely clear how to pull them over. Also sometimes you get a call to go to a specific street but it’s not clear how to "arrive" at the locations. I just keep having to circle the block and slow down/stop until it takes. If you get a message while driving and happen to be clicking on something when you get it, the message will click away and you won't get a chance to read it. Also, sometimes messages will disappear before you're done reading them. All in all it’s the least entertaining part of the game and really lowered the enjoyability quite a bit.

The game can get very redundant at times. Every time you go to the jail you have to put your gun in the locker. I can think of at least five different times we went to the jail and there might have been more. Everytime we change clothes we have to take a shower. I can think of at least three times this happened, but again it was probably more. It feels like you constantly are traveling between locations and are having to drive. All of this, again, really lowered my enjoyment of the game.

So one nitpicky thing that doesn’t allow me to completely immerse myself in the world is the fact that the entire game seems to take place over the course of one day. There is never any indication that any time has passed in order to move onto a new day. With all of the various arrests we make and situations we deal with, I find it very hard to believe that it all takes place over the course of a single day. Even if it was broken up into two or three days it would have been easier to swallow. Ultimately this isn’t a major issue, just something I noticed.

Finally, the game gets a little... preachy at times. One of the most noticable moments is after you pull over the speeding woman and write a ticket. After she leaves your character has a moment and reflects on how they’re just trying to keep everyone safe and enforce the law. It feels a lot like the writer of the game is speaking directly to a player in an attempt to “reach” them or even make them feel bad. Maybe it was just me that was bothered by it but it was just another moment that pulled me out of the game rather than more fully immersed me in the story.

Other Things To Note
I played this game in windowed mode and for whatever reason any time I tabbed out and came back into the game, the cursor would generally do this thing where it just started rotating through all of the icon options in the menu and I have no idea why and couldn’t figure out how to make it stop so I usually would have to close and restart the game. If I didn’t have the manual printed out this would have been a huge issue since you have to reference the manual so much.

If I had to close and then restart the game right away (like in the scenario mentioned above), I always had trouble getting it started again. I could open the game and tell it to start but then I would get a message saying “unable to initialize your audio hardware.” My original solution was to restart the computer but later I discovered if I just waited a minute and tried again things would sort themselves out. It was still a frustrating delay.

There seemed to be a bug during the final driving scene to the hotel. Sometimes when you are driving a “STOP” image will show up. When this happens you’re supposed to slow your car to 15mph or less to stop at the stop sign. During this final drive sequance the stop image activated but then never shut off no matter how slow I was going. Since I was not driving a police car I couldn’t turn on the siren which allows you to ignore stop signs and I ended up driving the entire way at 15mph in case an actual stop was required.

Another bug was at the poker game. You have to win the game in order to progress. You can try to win it yourself or you can just select the option to win automatically. I decided to attempt it myself but as soon as it tried to load the poker screen, the game crashed. I don’t know if this was a bug for me of if it’s an issue with the game as I didn’t have a chance to go retry.

Overall Assessment.
Police Quest 1 seems to only be available in bundles with most of the other Police Quest games. At the time of this review you can find Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel on the sites below for the listed price:

Steam (Police Quest Collection): 9.99 | GoG (Police Quest Collection): 9.99

In my opinion, this is more than reasonable for a bundle of four(technially 5) games.

After rewatching my playthrough and reflecting on my experience with this game, I decided I wasn’t very fair to PQ1. I had a walkthrough that I had been using as a security blanket for most of the game when I should have taken more time to study the manual, read more carefully, and use my own brain to connect everything. While all of the frustrations I had while playing the game are still relevant (my note about the gun locker at the jail in particular), the whole point of the game is to feel like a simulation of being a police officer which makes the game’s attention to protocal and detail extraordinary. All the information is there if you care to look for it. However, I still feel like the game is extremely slow to get started. Certainly we are trying to experience life as a police officer but this is also supposed to be a game and at least the first half felt very bland. One of the key things to make stories engaging and meaningful is to show rather than tell and I feel like the game did more telling than showing. I think I would rate this game 3.5 stars but not 4 and since you can’t rate half stars on Grouvee, I’ll have to give it 3. To me, I just wasn’t really invested in the game til over halfway through and driving was really tedious for me. While I can see myself playing through this again someday, it probably won’t be any time soon. I don’t think this game will be for everyone but if you like classic point-and-click adventure games and don’t mind a little bit of frustration, this game is definitely one to try.

For anyone interested I previously streamed Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel. You can find the videos here:

• Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel Part 1: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/261478016
• Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel Part 2: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/264362780
• Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel Part 3: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/265556578

My Twitch Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/piratesavvy

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I hope you found some helpful information in here! Happy gaming everyone!
- piratesavvy