Fashion Police Squad (2022)

I'm not really into FPS games, and much less Doom-like ones, but Fashion Police Squad managed to grab my attention with its bizarre yet entertaining story and mechanics. There's a bunch of references and silly humor thrown around that manage to give you a few chuckles along the way, but it eventually just falls a bit flat with everything else.

It's not too long though, so it's more of a one-time playthrough. But I did find the secrets fun enough to get them all!

But yeah, that's pretty much it. You can never go wrong when it comes to turning hideous fashion crimes into stylish ones. At least I wish I could do that sometimes.,, yikes.

First off, I love this game's sense of humor. The awful acronyms, the anagrams, funny secrets of Sergeant Des dressed like He Man and Jotaro. That's one of the best points for Fashion Police Squad. All the perps that you deal with in the level even do a strut down a catwalk at the end showing off their new duds. It really knows what it's about, and takes that all the way to the end.

Gameplay is fairly standard, and is clearly influenced by Doom. The original. Not Doom the newer. You know what I mean. You'll zoom around and blast color into grey suits, or cinch up loose clothes. Every enemy can only be damaged by one or two weapons which correspond to their specific fashion crimes. It's funny and thematic, but it can become nightmarish in later levels. Around like, level 10, this game gets sadistically hard. Multiple enemies with AOE attacks will bombard you from a distance while dozens of weak minions will swarm you. The combination of the Rave Girl and a single guy on a scooter caused me more frustration than almost anything else I can think of this year.

For the amount of platforming in this game, I wish it were good. Later levels are insane with the amount of really hard jumps you have to make. Not really sure what the hell that's about.

The final boss deserves some special shit, too. For the entirety of the game you've been shooting up fashion criminals, so why don't we have you do some Tony Hawk's Pro Scooter? Just get a kind of ridiculous amount of points and we'll let you continue the boss fight. Utterly bizarre choice.

I have a lot of complaints, but this game is very fun, and as said earlier, has a great personality.

This fun "boomer shooter" (ugh, I hate that term. Can't we agree to go back to call them 'Doom-clones'?) was actually pretty fun and its gimmick, with every fashion criminal being weak to only one or maybe two weapons, makes for very intense shootings even if it gets a little frustrating in the most difficult sections. I also laughed at a lot of puns, even when they didn't worked in spanish (the localization is atrocious).

But is not actually a great game. Is very janky, gets repetitive and doesn't takes it jokes to the extremes it is asking to go. Is also a very simple parody of police and the fashion industry, not a critic or satire of any of that.

You can read my full review in spanish in GamerFocus. I played the PS5 version.

I enjoyed several of this retro throwbacks to the FPS genre, but maybe its time to dial it back a little. This one is fun, but is offers nothing new or specially interesting.