LA Cops Reviews
Check out LA Cops Review Scores from trusted Critics below. With 13 reviews on CriticDB, LA Cops has a score of:
LA Cops is a neat game of cops and criminals that's just too short-lived and lacking. The 70s style is a nice touch and the partner dynamic adds a strategic bent (even if we did mostly just use the second cop as an extra life) to what is otherwise a fairly sterile twin-stick shooter. It's not quite our bag of donuts.
All things considered, LA Cops is a decent addition to the sub-genre but one that falls short of its initial promise. With more sophisticated AI and a comprehensive partner system in place, this could’ve been a worthy stablemate for its East Coast cousin. As it stands, it’s hard to recommend LA Cops when you can pick up the next slice of Hotline Miami’s gory abstraction at a similar price point.
From the vibrant visuals and the pitch perfect 70s cop theme to the fast and snappy buddy cop action, LA Cops has a lot of great ideas, but hasn’t really done enough with them. The partner system in particular could have been something unique and special, evocative of classic buddy cop films and TV series, but in the end, I was just gunning down enemies with my backup around the corner.
When all of the different mechanics in LA Cops come together, it can be a pretty fun and memorable experience; it's just a shame that things don't come together more often. The game rarely forces the player to use the teamwork mechanic, and since it's non-functional most of the time, we typically refrained from using it anyway. Ultimately, LA Cops is a decent, short run through a cop-themed shooter that doesn't do enough to really impress.
Top-down shooter action with '70s style but wobbly execution.
LA Cops is a rad action game with a tactical aspect that sees you cleaning up the mean streets of 70s LA one action packed shootout at a time.
Overall L.A Cops is okay, if you don’t go in with high expectations. And there’s potential in the mix for the developers to patch things up and provide more consistent experience. Even with those requisite patches the game will be limited, but then at $15 it’s not asking you to bankrupt yourself to try it out.
It's possible that LA Cops could have turned out to be a really cool game, if the developers had taken the time to polish their idea. Maybe they could have thrown an exciting cop story into the mix, or maybe extended the campaign so that it didn't end after just an hour or two. That wasn't the case, and now it just feels like a broken beta version of an unfinished game. A really good looking one perhaps, but it's just too bad that almost everything else about it falls flat.
It is often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. What isn’t said quite so often is that the imitator proved to be better than the original. There’s no question that LA Cops took much of its inspiration from the wildly popular Hotline Miami. A top down, isometric twin stick shooter it has all the trappings that made Hotline Miami popular but none if its charm (hrmm, that might be the wrong word to describe Hotline) and despite wearing that inspiration on its sleeve falls remarkably flat.
I'm pretty convinced LA Cops committed police brutality on me after I had to sit through its broken stealth, non-functional lock-on, useless partner AI, terrible level design, and stats that didn't do anything.
LA Cops arrives to Xbox One and PC on the heels of Hotline Miami 2’s release. It very much feels like a “me too” copy-cat, but that doesn’t always spell doom for a game. So how does LA Cops stack up to the competition and is it worthy of your time?