Police Shootout – PS5 Review

Police Shootout is a turn-based first person shooter from Polish dev team Hypnotic Ants.  Their previous work includes Deconstruction Simulator, Ship Graveyard Simulator and Dreamo.  None of which you’ll have heard of but you can tell from each game’s artwork that we’re not dealing with a triple-A studio here.  And Police Shootout, pretty much from the off does a lot of things to make a terrible first impression.

So, with all that in mind, and considering that we’re about to list a lot of things we don’t like about this game, it’s worth remembering one thing:  for all its many faults, we kind of enjoyed this game.

You play as Police Officer Scott Price.  There’s not a whole lot of scene-setting and, indeed, Price’s thin backstory plays out over the game’s eleven missions, but the story is that he left the big city to come and work in the quieter town of San Adrino.  You’ll be investigating reports of robberies and thefts but the game hints at a bigger motivation for Price, to find out what happened to his brother.

A quick tutorial explains the game’s simple, but interesting, combat mechanics.  When you get into a confrontation with a criminal, the game switches from free movement into turn-based combat.  You get a few action points and these can be used to move to a new location (from cover to cover), hide or start shooting.  When it’s time to shoot, a small moving indicator appears, going back and forth over a horizontal line and you need to hit R2 at the right time.  If the indicator is over the perp when you do that, you’ll do damage.

Generally, you get two shots and then have to duck, so you’ll need to use these opportunities well.  However, if you want to really test your skills, you can aim for the knees (which stops enemies from running to other cover – a totally useless thing to do) or their hands, which can disarm them.  Disarming enemies, despite the game’s name, is the preferred option as it’ll get you a better end-of-mission score.

The tutorial is over quickly and you’ll soon be rocking up at your first call.  Two drivers have had a crash outside of a supermarket but when you interview them it turns out that one of them was distracted by the supermarket being robbed.  And now it’s time to be a good cop and get in there.

The key to success is talk to everyone  you can, get as much intel as possible, take out perps, rescue civilians and find evidence.  The more of that you can do, the better your score and that translates into skill points that can bolster your abilities somewhat (more on that later).  Invariably though, you’ll end the mission having missed a load of clues.  We spent like fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to rescue a girl from a toilet because it turned out there was a guy hidden in the freezer section that we needed to talk to.  This sort of thing happens often but when you replay missions, you can generally get them done completely in five or so minutes.

Eventually, you’ll take out two henchmen, rescue some folks and will then have an altercation with the head honcho of the robbery.  You can’t stealth that guy (but you can still disarm him via shooting) but before you get into the shoot out with him, you can try negotiating.  Here the game will over up a number of ‘cards’ that contain information you’ve gathered during the mission.  Pick the right options and he’ll surrender.  Pick the wrong ones and he’ll get pissy and you’ll be blasting your way out of there.  Here’s the thing:  the negotiations make no sense, there’s no indication of what will annoy him and ultimately it doesn’t matter as you may as well just shoot the prick.

And pretty much, this is how all eleven missions more or less play out.  Some have more enemies, some have just one.  Some involve organised crimes, some are just two guys robbing a gas station or an unhappy husband holding his wife hostage in a motel.  But they’re short enough to not really get on your nerves.  We ended up playing through the game a bunch of times (not our choice) but we never really minded replaying missions, especially if we were being a better cop each time.

There are so many issues though.   The presentation is a good place to start.  The graphics look, at best, like some sort of mundane mod for Unreal Tournament.  The plain assets and lack of visual flair make this look like a PC game from 20+ years ago.  Also, the game reuses character assets which is just ridiculous.  And that’s made worse by the fact that in the first ten stages, there are only five locations.  You go to each one twice.  And this is all while trying to unearth a conspiracy.  So seeing identical characters pop up time and again is just confusing because they aren’t the same guy.  But then sometimes, they will be.  It’s just so lazy and poorly executed.

The worst aspect of the presentation comes thanks to the audio.  Each mission starts and ends with you in your patrol car, with the engine revving.  Makes sense except that you hear that noise when you’re in the police station.  And it gets worse.  The voice acting here is the worst ever committed to a video game.  The game is seemingly set somewhere in the Southern states of the USA and yet you’ll meet a witness who sounds like a local but then a hired thug who has a gentle London accent (even though they’ve got a skinhead).  It’s like they just picked voice actors from wherever and got them to pull out their characters from a mystery bag.  It’s so badly done.

The gameplay also has problems.  From characters getting stuck in dialogue loops (if you speak to Johny, he just repeats the line in the screenshot above over and over), which means you have to restart the entire level, combat sequences glitching out, people going missing and random crashes, this game hasn’t been playtested sufficiently at all.  But even when it is working, the interface design is clunky too.  It’s never easy or fun to play, everything feels like a struggle but because of how dated it all seems.  There’s no modern game design here at all.

One really weird thing becomes apparent if you try to go for the game’s platinum trophy.  At the end of each mission, you’ll level up a bit depending on how well you completed it.  Levelling up gives you skill points that can be invested across three skill trees:  combat, negotiation and stealth.  Now, you’d think having a bit of each would be a good idea.  But when we completed the game we were nowhere near maxing out any of the trees.  You can earn enough skill points to max out one, if you focus on it and don’t buy too many upgrades outside of that tree.

The game doesn’t warn you of this and it doesn’t let you earn extra points for replaying missions.  Sure, you’ll maybe level up a little if you beat that level better than you did before but we had 100% on most of them and still were off the pace.  So then all you can do is restart the game, which strips your level, and then focus on just one tree.  It’s just piss-poor trophy design.  Thankfully, the game is pretty short and you can do a bit of save scumming if you want to save yourself two entire playthroughs of a game that you may have already finished twice like we had.

And then there’s the funniest issue with the game.  That missing brother storyline that the game throws in?  That goes absolutely nowhere.  They do almost nothing with it.  When we finished the eleventh mission we expected some sort of big reveal but in the end the game just seemed to forget about it.

But, even with all those problems, and the extra playthroughs we kind of enjoyed this one.  I mean, it’s terrible in almost every respect but the enjoyment comes almost as a form of nostalgia.  This is like playing a cheap, 7 out of 10 reviewed PS2 game or something.  The kind of game that you only played because you owned it and piles of shame didn’t exist back then.  We felt compelled to perfect every level and get all the trophies and, yet, we don’t really know why and that’s almost an accidental by-product of the game’s production.