Beverly Hills Cop

Based on the Beverly Hills Cop movie franchise. Released for the PlayStation 2 only in Europe. It was developed by 3rd Dimension Creations and Atomic Planet Entertainment, and published by Blast! Entertainment. The conversation mechanic advertised on the back of the box boils down to making a spinning wheel stop and hoping it lands on the green-coloured chambers. While it can be useful here and there, sometimes, it's downright useless. Even if you manage to get three correct speeches, in some situations, the game is scripted so the enemies would still open fire to you, like in the first level. What's the point of being forced to use this mechanic when they will open fire regardless? The back of the box also claims that with the conversation mechanic, Axel can talk his way out of fighting enemies, which is a lie, because there are no branching situations (like with the mentioned conversation in the first level, where even if you succeed, you will get into a gunfight anyway). And just one screw up during the mini-game can result in a Mission Failure. The main menu theme is a cheap rip off of the original movie's theme song by Harold Faltermeyer. Even worse, there are horrible cartoonish sound effects for the weapons. And to add salt to the blisters, there's no voice acting; instead all dialogue converses via subtitles (with lots of typos throughout). Axel Foley's character model looks nothing like Eddie Murphy, he's portrayed as white and they didn't even give him hair or facial hair, gave him the wrong coloured jacket. Presumably, this was done intentionally because they were too cheap to afford his likeness. He looks a lot similar to Mr Clean, but just with a jacket on. He also moves slow, despite the game's controls wanting him to sprint. The story is so paper-thin it's almost non-existent. In fact, the actual intro to the game is a wall of text tucked away in the manual. The cutscenes are unskippable, especially problematic in the 1st level which begins with a 35 second-long cutscene the game forces you to watch every time you restart. The first level has nothing to do with the rest of the game and accomplishes nothing; however, strangely enough, it is the only level in the game to actually be based on anything from any of the films. But unfortunately, it's based on the opening sequence of Beverly Hills Cop III, which is considered the worst film in the franchise. Terrible animations: even characters' clothing doesn't even move at even a bit. On a level, there is a man whose legs move like they are walking on a treadmill. Additionally, the graphics are very fugly and outdated, making it comparable to an early Nintendo 64 game. On that note, the water reflection in Level 3 looks terrible, and to add insult to injury, this game was released in 2006, the same year as the PlayStation 3! The level design is repetitive and lazy - two of the game's six levels are set in the docks and the fifth level is just a series of fetch quests with nothing else to actually do in terms of action. The level objectives are often made to be as tedious as possible (backtracking halfway through levels to pick up items the game only now informs you of) and often make no logical sense (to finish the first level you have to get gas from a gas pump and use it on a specific car to use as a getaway - even though another car in the same level already has gas and Axel could just leave the building on foot). The A.I is really bad. Primarily, a good example of that is the inability for enemies to shoot you while you are crouching, because they weren't designed to be able to look up and down, so they just shoot above your head! By the way, the hit detection if anything isn't any better. The gameplay is unstable and messy - enemies in the stealth sections can randomly see you from a mile away, causing you to fail the Mission, and will also often vanish, sink into the floor or immediately come back to life after being killed. The stealth missions are also frustrating and unfair because if you get caught, you cannot fight back or escape. It's an instant Mission Failure, thus being forced to replay the entire Mission from the start. Even the last part of the game is so poorly designed you'll keep failing the Mission, with no clear reason as to why. The lack of content and quality can probably be explained by the fact that this PS2 game, in 2006, was printed on a CD instead of a DVD. Oh, and did I mention that when extracted, the ROM of the game is around 100MB in total? This was made for the PS2, not the PS1. The game can otherwise be considered "so bad it's good" because of all the bugs. Give this one a miss...