Easily one of the strangest games I’ve purchased this generation, Police Chase is a misguided Euro-centric Need for Speed budget clone that misses everything that makes that series fun.
You play as a wannabe womanising cop across 15 story missions that introduce you to the city that you’ll be driving around. The city has various areas like a harbour, a café, a city centre and a motorway ring road and is quite well put together for a title without a budget. It is such a shame that the rest of the game is an utter mess to play.
Of the 15 story missions, three are races and ten are point to point fetch quests across the city. It isn’t until a third of a way through the game that the story goes beyond fetching your colleagues or your bosses car and doing silly errands for them. Half of these missions have no time limit and so as long as you don’t smash up the car, you can’t really fail them. When time limits occur later on, you may find it takes a go or two to work out the fastest road to get somewhere and then you’ll clear them with ease. You may think that doing this with cop cars may be fun but it isn’t. Each car handles nearly the same except for a small RC bomb detector you use twice which is a bit more zippy and oversteer happy. It is a nice idea but you’ll never get to rev these up outside of these two brief mission points. Everything else you drive just floats and understeers like a cow at the same time. You can get out of your car but you have no need to ever in the game and you can’t get into any other cars except your own. When you do, you walk at a snails pace too. Why is it included? Twice in the game you’ll also get to stalk a car slowly within range and once smash it to a pulp by ramming it. Just once. The whole story builds to a single car chase. Then its game over and into random free play missions and racing on 15 race courses mapped out on the city. What Need for Speed gives you every checkpoint, Police Chase delivers as its story finale. That speaks volumes at how off course the design of this game is.
The sheer misdirection of the entire game cannot be under estimated. Nothing is exciting about it at all. The game is also crumbling under its own weight too. AI traffic cars get stuck or crash into each other and don’t clear themselves. I had this multiple times in one of my stalker missions and as the AI car just sits there, I had to drive just outside of range through a tunnel and bump the AI crashed traffic cars out of the way to get things going again. What a great sneaky mission that was! Half an hour of my life wasted. This issue affects collision detection too. You can smash a barrier at 150kph and not have a scratch yet hit a lamp post at 20kph and be totalled. Next time it’ll be the other way round. There is no rhyme or reason to it. I also had UI huds get stuck on the screen, the game freeze up entirely three times and free play mode seems to slow down and loose frames over time like it’s leaking memory. It is a sham. Also – why does the cover art look like it belongs on Porn Hub?
For those of you perverse enough to want to play this, the campaign, if it runs, can be completed in a couple of hours. The races and freeplay may keep you entertained for a little longer but frankly I was so over the broken shell of the experience, I rushed around to get all the trophies (no platinum) and uninstalled it as quickly as possible. I thought this was initially developed by the team that did the Crash Time games for PS3 but its not. Those games were competent budget titles. This is just incompetent.
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