Beat Cop Reviews

Beat cop is a pixel-art, point-and-click adventure game with strong emphasis on time management. It follows Jack Kelly, a New York detective turned into… Well, beat cop. During one of his interventions he prevented some thieves from barging into the Senator house and stealing some stuff, which he initially failed, because thugs stole diamonds from the place, for which our protagonist was wrongly accused. Now, he has only 21 days to discover the truth, clear his name and expose some dark shenanigans hiding in the shadows. All of this accompanied by hilarious plot lines, colorful characters and some wacky, over the top dialogues. When I bought this game I expected some old school adventure game, similar to maybe an early Police Quest. Turns out, I was wrong. Beat Cop is basically a buddy cop tv drama turned into a game. Don’t expect something serious, something deep and dark. There are a lot of jokes here and even more absurdity instead of some drama and real life problems. The game does not even in the slightest pretend to do that and try to distance themself as much as possible. Is it stereotypical? Yup. Offensive? You betcha! Funny? Hell yeah. But first thing first — let’s talk about gameplay. The core experience here is built around time management. The clock is always ticking — like when you check cars lights or tires, or when you just wait for a police car to pick up a thief you catched — and you have the entire street to protect. Plus you need to give enough parking tickets (because of the sarge on the precinct who breathes on your neck constantly), plus you maneuver between black gangs and Italian mobsters, plus quests from NPC plus main storyline… If you expect a more relaxed, story-oriented, slow experience, this is not a game for you. Thankfully, you need just not be a little bih, have minimum understanding about multitasking and time management and you will be golden. Seriously, the game tells you at the beginning to not try to do everything, but with a little more preparation you can do that easily. On the other hand, if you screw something, your only option is to restart the entire day from scratch, because this game does not hand hold you all the time, quests have multiple stages, and you can fail every one of them, even the main storyline. Yup, if you miss even one plot point, for example, on day three — which sometimes means talking to a specific NPC on a specific hour — you can screw yourself without knowing this for the rest of the playthrough. And this creates this strange feeling throughout the entire gameplay. On the one hand, you are here to experience the story, but on the other, you cannot fully immerse yourself, because you have multiple things to do every minute of the day. At some point I was literally running all the time from one point to another, taking notes in the notepad and building the optimal route to do absolutely everything. But it's doable, if you put in some EFFORT. The only time when time stops is when you talk with somebody, which is a blessing, because I cannot fathom playing Beat Cop and literally being forced to skip dialogue because “time is running out”. So, another pro-tip: if you have nothing to do at any point of the day, that means you screwed something. So you start your day and have multiple tasks to perform. First, you need to give a certain number of tickets every day. Sometimes it's only parking tickets, sometimes only for broken lights or worn out tires. But, again, everything takes time. Checking tires, lights, even parking meters. So you must learn to do it on the fly. Car parked in a “no parking zone”? Ticket. Black marks under tires? Ticket. Sparkling lights? Ticket. You need to do this almost every day, there are no excuses, but I think every day numbers are fairly balanced. I usually did all the chores in the first two hours of the day so I could focus on more important stuff. Like doing favour to organized crime groups — mobsters or gangs — or helping citizens. There are a bunch of NPC you need to keep an eye on, like shopkeepers, restaurant owners, priests in church etc. The majority of them have quest lines tied to them, ranging from making drugs for said priest (don’t ask) or helping sexshop owner make a porn movie — which include finding a famous retired male actor and convincing him to play the main role. And again, if you screw even one event, it is over, you need to restart… They are all wacky, full of references — just go to random tenement and read some names, you will discover a bunch of movie characters living in some places — and not taking itself seriously. On top of that you have a quest from the police — like searching for specific suspects, securing contraband or discovering hidden meetings of the cult. You can fail them too, which is bad, because there is a reputation meter, same as with mafia or gangs, measured from -100 to +100. If it reaches the latter, you can unlock a special ending, and if the former, they will kick you out from force or send hitmen after you. Unfortunately, the endings are a bit of letdown. Just a page from the newspaper describing what happened. And there is a literally insignificant difference between the ending. Scoring +100 reputation with mafia or gang has similar output, Kelly just joins their ranks and disappears. Same with police, you are just moving to a different department. But hey it is a journey, because scoring +100 demands focusing on only one group, since their interest in most cases excludes themself. I did mafia reputation in 10 days, doing favors only to them for achievement, then I spent the rest of my time working for gangs. I did police work on my third run, which was a slog, because events aren't randomized. If something happened on day 9, it will always happen on that day. The main storyline is no different. You have multiple steps that you need to perform for successfully scoring an ending, which is just choosing a different person to cooperate with. If you fail, you can still play until day 21, but Kelly will end up jobless or worse, stuck as a regular beat cop till the end of his days. But what is the point? Especially when there are a lot of events that can end your run prematurely, like on the last day, where you track down terrorists. If you fail on even one step, it's game over man, game over. Anyway, that’s it. Oh yeah, if you are easily offended or sitting a godly amount of time on twitter, better not pick up this game. It is offensive, it is vulgar and inappropriate, but if you cannot stand some pixelated, fictional NPC swearing and saying non-PC things, I can only pity you. The game is set in 1986 and shows the mentality of this time, so suck it up, sonny. I would rather things closest to the truth rather than sterilized, because someone is upset and is unable to distance fiction from reality. Now. It's over. Go home or something.

Plot has nothing to do with gameplay, you're basically just doing chores with basically no stamina, so racist the devs tried covering their asses with a "dont take it too seriously lol" disclaimer at the beginning (which is NOT an excuse) and the "humor" is just penis jokes and even more racism.

Kelly's sprite got stuck and stopped moving after less than 30 minutes of playing. From Steam threads it happens a lot and there's no active support for the game anymore. Also very racist towards the Black community - if you're going to be "authentic" to the era then why do the Italians not get the same? You're constantly arresting Black people because of course they're doing all the crimes... /s and there's also a sprite of a Black person walking around EATING A WATERMELON. Urgh.

Cool and simple game, nice story with a lot of goofy moments (also some intenste ones)

Awesome atmosphere, cool graphics and fun, addicting and challenging gameplay. If you're into cheesy cop movies, you need to play this.

It's a...fine game. Nothing special, or particularly memorable about it. The highlights of this game are the pixelated artstyle and the interactions between Jack Kelly and the other characters. They're hillarious and well written. My main problem with this game is the lack of direction when doing some of the quests, as they can be very confusing sometimes. There's like 9 endings or so, couldn't bother playing the last day again to unlock all of them, you don't even get achievements for all of them. The endings are literally just a picture: a page from a news article. Kinda disappoining, I expected a cutscene or something that took a bit more effort. All in all, this game didn't really catch my interest and because of that I don't think I'm gonna 100% it. But it's alright, I don't regret playing it at all. If you really like detective work, being a cop, stuff of that nature, check it out, it's quite cheap in price anyway.