No Longer A Mirage: LA Cops Early Access

LA Cops contains more comedy moustaches per screen than the Beastie Boys' Sabotage video and Anchorman put together. It's a celebration of facial furniture, with Syndicate-inspired shooting in between bouts of Handsome Cop Admiration. As well as moustaches, the game includes destructible scenery and a buddy system that allows a single player to control a two-cop team, implementing tactics to lure bad guys onto the disco killing floor. The Early Access version, which is available now, contains a single four scene level (taken from the planned eight levels, with a total of twenty scenes). Each of the available cops has a story to tell, a favoured 'stache shampoo and attributes to upgrade.

The action is real-time, a fact which sends my turn-based heart into a panicked stutter. Surely I can handle two cops though? It'd be different if I had to control the entire police force.

"We expect LA Cops to be in Early Access for around two months. We have deliberately left Early Access relatively late into development as we want to make sure that what we put out is fun to play and worthy of paying money for. During the time that the game is in Early Access it will be usability tested to ensure that the game is intuitive, easy to play but hard to master."

Sounds like the full version will have more of the same rather than anything radically different. Feedback should help to improve the basics but the current content is a complete slice of game rather than a single ingredient waiting for seasoning and structure.

I do like the aesthetic but can't help but wish for an alternate universe La Cops about extravagantly coiffured but grammatically deficient gendarmes.