Beverly Hills Cop

Or as someone from Giant Bomb phrased it, "The 9/11 of video games".

Thinking about it, they are completely right. This is likely the worst FPS game ever that isn't bigoted NS trash made by hate groups, and I say this with confidence. Looking up a Youtube video of the gameplay should be enough to tell you where this is headed.

Now, let's run through the negatives. Rest assured, i can only think of negatives when talking about aspects that affect gameplay.

The gunplay is absolutely horrendous with nearly zero impact response and terrible animations. The graphics are insulting to the original PlayStation and Nintendo 64, with horrible models, lighting, and soggy textures. The framerate is a joke, frequently dipping well below 25FPS (this is a PAL game, after all) while also making your aim EXTREMELY jerky when it does, with jarring jumps to 50. And don't get me started on the AI, which just breaks when you crouch, making the enemies mostly unable to hit you. The conversation system is nonsensical too, where if you don't time it correctly, YOU GET SENT STRAIGHT BACK TO THE BEGINNING OF THE LEVEL. Movement is sluggish as hell. Oh, and the character model looks nothing like Axel. I'll touch on that later, as it's rather funny. There are likely many more issues with the game, but the gameplay was just so disgusting that I gave up playing it past the first stage.

And finally, the only positives.

Your character model looks like Mr. Clean, and you can see him do an "OK" symbol with his hand on the level complete screen, and it is absolutely glorious. The particle effects can also act be rather nice in some areas, to some surprise.

How Sony allowed this to pass QA, I may never know. At least you can play as Mr. Clean, if you see that as a positive. This is a shining example of terrible game design and piggybacking off of a license, and it almost seems intentional in places.

So this game is, uh, pretty obviously not great. You gun and stealth your way through levels with absolutely broken gun and stealth play and use the absolutely revolutionary revolver conversation system to randomly select responses to a conversation that runs the gamut to "instantly get a game over" to "get caught in a shootout where you're shot multiple times before you can even get your gun over to an enemy." Game overs, mind you, put you back at the very beginning of a level because there aren't any checkpoints, meaning that if you don't quite get that you're supposed to shoot the helicopter to stop the final boss from escaping rather than catch up to it (which is what the game signposts) whoops! You're set back, like, 30 minutes of progress. Wanna figure out how the stealth mechanics work during a dedicated stealth segment and an enemy even so much as looks at you? Better hope you get used to seeing the intro cutscene for the level repeat over and over again. It's wayyyy too punishing and it makes an already broken game worse. The game as a whole isn't completely irredeemable — the core gameplay loop of staying crouched to block 90% of bullets, shooting enemies who can't hit back to dead silence is way more fun than it should be, ironic or not, and its short enough that it doesn't wear out the little welcome it has — but, uh, yeah. Maybe not "the 9/11 of video games" like the founder of Giant Bomb purported it to be, but still pretty bad.