Apr 08, 2017  A brand new series! We're busting down on crime! Click here to make all your dreams come true!! Get Beat Cop here. Mar 30, 2017  A retro, pixel art style adventure in New York, inspired by 80’s cop shows. You are Jack Kelly and you’ve been framed for murder. Now as a regular beat cop you have to find out, who did that.

Beat Cops: the 80s-tastic gaming homage to police TV shows.Source:Supplied

THE 1980s are looked back at with fondness now — Back To The Future, classic Michael Jackson, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Walkmans, worrying your kids will discover you’re actually Soviet spies.

No, wait, that last thing was a series arc in The Americans.

One thing pretty much everyone agrees the 1980s did well was action movies and police shows; gunfire, speedboats, cars, snappy dialogue and so many cliches they’ve been keeping the community at TV Tropes busy for years.

A lot of what was acceptable in the 80s would now be considered outdated now — the smoking, the automatically assuming the not-white person did it, the shooting everything

Beat Cop, developed by Pixel Crew and published by 11 Bit Studios on Steam, pitches itself as a loving homage to police action movies and TV shows of the 70s and 80s and encourages you not to take it too seriously.

Set in 1986, the premise is that you are Jack Kelly, a New York detective framed for murder and a jewel theft, and demoted to general duties policing while the investigation takes place.

The graphics are pixel-tastic 80s retro and the soundtrack is great, with era-evocative music including some soft synthesiser too.

Stylistically and mechanically there are similarities to titles such as Papers, Please and 11 Bit’s previous (and excellent) game, This War of Mine.

I was hoping Beat Cop would be more about asking street punks if they wanted to go double or nothing on the remaining ammunition in a .44 Magnum-calibre Smith & Wesson Model 29 revolver, or dealing with significant social issues from the era.

Instead, it’s mostly about writing parking tickets, chasing shoplifters and the difficulties of being in two places at once.

Primordial in a sentence. Beat Cops missed a chance to be grandiose, like the 80s culture it is parodying.Source:Supplied

You have an entire street to patrol horizontally with a number of houses and businesses on it. Your beat starts at 8am and finishes at 6pm, and time will quickly get away on you as people ask you to solve problems and you strive to meet your quota of parking tickets or vehicle defect fines.

Adding to your woes, your character has to regularly find spousal maintenance payments for their ex-wife, for some reason.

While your character receives a daily pay cheque for their work, there’s also opportunities to earn a bit extra on the side, either from taking bribes to let people off parking tickets, or in exchange for helping the street’s two organised crime outfits (the Mafia and the Crew) in their shenanigans. Obviously you can’t help one without annoying the other and working with either of them isn’t going to help your standing as a police officer.

Allegedly the game is supposed to be humorous but the writing is clichéd and generally isn’t great so I rarely found myself cracking a smile — which is a shame, because I wanted to be a 1980s Jake Peralta and make smartass comments and take nothing seriously while winding up a perpetually stressed and humourless captain.

The tasks you have to carry out in the game can border on the mundane.Source:Supplied

Beyond the retro graphics there’s basically nothing about the game which screams “1980s!” – although the plot is a deliberate era-appropriate cliche, one of the missions is a Red Heat parody where you have to babysit a Russian police officer, and several of the names on apartment intercoms are references to pop culture characters from that era and now.

Despite not living up to its promise of being a patrol down memory lane to an era of shoulder pads, neon colours and pistol-whipping crack dealers, it’s still (just) a passable game, despite several problematic bugs I’ve encountered.

There are rather a lot of them too, including shoplifters not appearing on the screen, tasks not activating properly, being penalised for events I wasn’t notified about and praised for dealing with situations I hadn’t sorted out. It’s not a complicated game so it’s surprising how many bugs are still present in Beat Cop.

Pokemon sun and moon lillie mom. It’s definitely not a AAA-game and it’s not going to be a massive time-sink — the main story takes place over a few weeks and can be completed in about 10 hours or so.

The basic premise — 1980s police game — is a solid one so it’s a shame Beat Cop ends up ultimately being an unpolished disappointment with too many bugs and flaws to overlook or make the game recommendable — except possibly as a bargain title in one of Steam’s famous sales.

Hopefully the current wave of 80s nostalgia will eventually get us the Miami Vice/Sledge Hammer!/CHiPS/Beverly Hills Cop-homage video game we’re secretly waiting for — especially since Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is now 15 years old.