Future Cop: LAPD (1998)

This game kicks so much ass. It takes everything that is awesome about Paul verhoeven's Robocop and makes it into a videogame. The voice acting and writing are tongue in cheek with a constant sense of escalation, both in the levity and drama. This is a straight cheese fest and I am all about it. You start the game fighting a gang, then zombies, then a worm worshiping cult, a prison that has been taken over by prisoners, mutant clowns, cyborgs, a dictator and a rogue AI, O my! Pure lunacy.

As ludicrous as the plot gets, the level design escalates in complexity as well. Upping the ante little by little. The level design is the biggest reason why this game kicks so much ass. A ton of thought went into crafting them. They typically inter loop on themselves, have shortcuts open up. The later levels can get confusing, due to how dense and complicated their layout becomes. Though the game does include a full map of the area you can look at by pausing. It shows the objectives and items, ect.

The last few levels can be so unnerving with the gratuitous amount of platforming required. Mission 7 in particular is my personal hell. It's constant platforming, including one section where there are two grates constantly moving, you need to jump across, but the clincher is there is a giant pendulum between the two platforms...thus you not only have to time your jump to land on a moving platform while you are also moving, but you need to time it to also not get hit by the pendulum at the same time... fuck... the level does include a slow section after that veritable hell where you meander around performing "Crowd Control" through a few small linear sections. Game Design my dudes.

I think a great example of excellent level design is the final mission. There's a highway that leads to the final boss. There are electric power grids that prevent you from walking on the highway, so you need to disable each grid and make your way to the boss. Once all the power grids are disabled, you walk down the highway back to the start of the level where you can now reach the boss. As elegant as that design is, fuck this level. It's so brutal in difficulty and there's this extremely frustrating platforming moment where you need to jump ontop of a moving crane... And the biggest bullshit moment was after I killed the final boss, there's always a death animation where you need to wait 3-4 seconds for the cinematic to start. I died during the 3-4 second weekend. The "Objective Complete" fucking appeared! Then game over... yeah I'm bitter. It doesn't help I failed that mission like 5 times (three times on the boss). What makes the final boss hard is you are constantly bombarded by spawning adds. Then the boss can only be attacked for very brief windows. The game has auto targeting so you are very unlikely to target the boss and instead target one of the many random spawning mobs... You have to basically manually swap targets quickly to the boss and hit him in the narrow window... so frustrating. Only time in the entire game where the toggle target is needed.

The controls work. Honestly not the clunkiest early 3-D shooter I've played. Dual analog support would be amazing, but using the D-Pad and L2 and R2 buttons to strafe get the job done. You'll get used to it. Certainly better than that Contra PS1 game...

I did beat this entire game with a friend and I highly recommend that approach. It makes the game much harder IMO because you share a health pool. Thus if your friend whiffs a platforming section and falls to his death, you die too (I totally NEVER made that mistake. Def never.)! But it's totally worth this potential frustration because it's so much fun. I didn't check out the competitive multiplayer but I plan to. Could be a fun way to spend an evening.

In conclusion, play this game. It rules. And we need a remastered so we can play it with dual analog support.

Beat on the hardest difficulty. The first 3 levels were awesome, and I had blast mowing down enemies and blowing shit up. The first thing I did was change the control scheme to L1 and R1 for strafe, with use and change target on the analog stick. There were a few times where the auto aim refused to target the closest enemy who was out of line of sight behind a corner, though I never felt the need to use the target switch button. The controls and gameplay were excellent, though strafing could result in moving too far and the hover car was difficult to not bounce off of every wall. This changed in level 4 onwards because of the greater focus on instant death platforming, which was far from this game's strong point. Jumping in the mech was awkward at best, and navigating narrow pathways was not much better. I died over a dozen times in level 4 from falling in water, and most of my deaths in later levels were from falling or environmental hazards rather than combat. In fact the only boss that I failed to kill on the first try was the prison dropships, and that was only because I ran out of ammo. The final 3 levels were annoying with platforming and gimmicky nonsense that seen me refer to a walkthrough multiple times. A technical issue I noticed was that audio cues did not always play at the appropriate trigger. Sometimes the entire backlog played after I looked at the map. After beating the campaign I beat each map in precinct assault once. I focused on claiming as many turrets as I could along the right side, then killing stuff to farm points. Spent those points on choppers for defense, then focused on attack. I won using either the dreadnought or spamming little tanks, and escorting them. It was actually easy to wipe out enemies and turrets. The hard part was keeping them down as they respawned. I did not try the sky fortress. This was a fun little mode that I could see playing again on occasion.

The weapons in this game were very satisfying to use. The sounds, the handling, and the enemy death animations made them feel powerful. I loved the mini gun, gatling laser, and electricity gun. I did not like the flamethrower and did not get the riot shield; I can't see wanting to use it because I like my guns long range. My preferred heavy weapon was the concussion beam because it combined high damage per shot with near instaneous hits. The rockets were good too, and the fusion torpedo did the most damage while being very slow. I did get the K9 rockets, which were incredibly slow but efficient because each shot could take out multiple enemies; it was more like a summoned minion than ordinance, but that made it less fun to use. The best special weapon was the plasma flare, which was a more powerful version of the mortar. I loved being able to shoot enemies over cover, thus the bouncy mine was crap. I went back for the grenade launcher and did not find it better than the flare because it seemed to have less of an arc trajectory. I would have enjoyed this game more if it was structured more like the Strike games with more open maps and more emphasis on strategy. The levels were a little confusing to navigate, especially when the camera went in too close or too far away. Despite the excellent combat, the platforming does not make me want to replay any time soon.

8.0/10

Future Cop LAPD was a game I had played a demo of long ago with it's own special demo level (if not mistaken) but never played beyond that. I'm eager to play Brigador but wanted to play this first. I like the main menu with the electronic industrial look with handle bars, as if you were inside the thing... it reminds me of iron tank. (this is the PC version, PSX looks different if i'm not mistaken from the videos on youtube)

This game feels a bit like an N64 or PS1 game. it's got amusing cutscene videos and tons of voice acting as you unlock checkpoints in a map. It feels almost like gauntlet legends mixed with syndicate wars... it's a maze-like arena styled 'dungeon crawler'. Most maps are obstacle courses. you clear the area of enemies then a door unlocks to proceed, you have to find a series of switches, etc (not exactly my thing).


Each mission has some kind of wanted criminal who is on the loose that you must exterminate with some zany background hinting at their misfit character's mental malfunction (it reminded me of NARC) Mobs of enemies aren't too interesting despite changing on each map, and remind me of Robotron. Lots of grunts with lower power weapons attack you en masse, flying enemies can be tricky. You have laser guided sights that indicate an enemy is targeted off screen. You can alter your weapon load-out between missions and are awarded more options to choose as you progress through the campagin which is really only about 8 maps and a bit less multiplayer only maps. Oh the game supports coop single player, but i didnt try to get it working. The weapons are pretty cool. You have a light main weapon, secondary weapon and heavy weapon. the main can be things like a machine gun, gatling laster or flamer. the secondary is rocket pods, and the third is some special heavy duty damage dealer (this gives it a bit of a desert strike type feel) your tank can also transform into a police car that's only purpose (besides looking cool that you have a transformer) is to go a bit faster, possible to make some jumps,ramps/secrets, etc.)


there are also bikers on venice beach. So chill.

The controls in the game are actually pretty good. you can fire multiple weapons or even all three weapons at once on bosses, however if you fire all three you are imobilized. (this could be a limitiation of my keyboard, but i believe it to be a limitation of the engine)

This game has not aged so well and it really looks cruddy and muddy and not in a good kind of cyberpunk way. Which is too bad because everything about this arcade styled third person arena 'dungeon crawler' game is done right. It actually has decent enough gameplay and controls are friendly enough that it's fun and playable though and a lot of things about it give it this certain rustic charm. Still, why play this? go buy Brigador!

In any case, fun little game,[ unfortunately it does not play nicely on modern systems after WinXP and is buggy and crashy outside of that OS. There's a lot of humor and funny things in the game. Between the credits, random funny bits a biohazard label on a box in a video that says ''BICHAZ when circle 3 solid means CONTAIMINATED' and easter eggs littered everywhere (my favorite is the space marines/imperial guard/ultramarines chapters in the Hells Gate mission (Chaos Gate anyone? Adeptus Arbites, lol) or how about an announcer at the spaceport asking OJ Simpson to pick up his white bronco? The videos are pretty creative cut scenes too. For it's time the credits use of modelling animation is suberb and very fluid. It's a feat in and of itself.

Funny how a game like this is great and easily forgotten as it fades so quick into virtual obscurity, having inspired quite a bit and been instrumental in the creation of what became the MOBA.... But even aside from that there is a very strong awareness of the arena styled combat that while very non traditional is essentially a hack and slash with guns (done right) and those are quite hard to find. The mazelike wandering in which a switch must be found (I did compare to gauntlet legends) limits the fun factor for me personally, in conjunction with the technical limitiations of playing it properly. (I managed to complete all the missions except the last two, then the game suddenly just stopped working altogether, so i watched let's play of those on youtube.)

If you love hack and slashes this might be worth looking at. If you are curious about the history of the MOBA this might interest you. a lot has transpired in the almost 18 years since this was released, I can therefore only reccomend it for the historical value.. Still it does a lot of things really well. The ability to morph into a hover car and then into a mech is pretty slick and its nice just to be able to move fast when not in a jumping puzzle ttype situation (you coast like a hover board when you are the car) supercharging you weapons and picking your loadout. A lot of elements in this game went on to be picked apart by different games later. refining things in their own way. At the end of the day it's an interesting game and worthy of mention and some effort towards curation for what it did achieve.