W00t, for once in my life I don’t have to write an introduction to a game. Everyone born in the last… 20 years… holy fuck I’m old, looks like I need to write an introduction for the kids. Alright, let’s get to work.

Virtua Cop was originally made for the arcades. For those of you too young to remember: arcades were machines which you put money into so that you could play the game. If you died you could put more money in to get an extra life, while sounding like an early version of microtransactions it wasn’t necessary as a skilled player could go on forever unlike the modern-day microtransactions.

Story:

NONE! NEXT!

Sound:

The background music was fine for its day. It doesn’t deliver the feeling of an action hero but it somehow does feel like a game track that would be remembered, especially when seen at an arcade. It’s alright, not great, not good but alright.

The voice acting is shit, to say the least.  The civilians have two voice actors, one male and one female to scream “Help me!”. The enemies are worse with just one shouting at you. The bosses have unique voice actors but all of them have two lines at most. 

The only thing remaining is the weapon shots that sound great. They feel powerful. When they hit an enemy, you hear a scream and that is just plain awesome. 

Graphics:

The graphics are bad by today’s standards, the graphics are capped to 640 X 480. The buildings look like they are made out of giant bricks. The cars have parallelograms for tires. If you look: you can see the pixels that make up the road work and textures. Yep! The world would be laughed at by today’s standard.

NPCs are equally bad. Everyone on screen is made out of tubes and squares; they had their makeup put on just before they were sent on stage making it drip off. The standard enemies are not great to look at. The bosses on the other hand are more detailed, they look badass and more ferocious than their standard counterparts. They look alright but for their time they looked amazing. 

I would like to point out that the special effects are amazeballs, not only for the time but for 10 years later. The enemy targeting reticle is perfect for the fact that it uses simple colours to show how close the enemy is to firing. Enemies react to where they were shot which we still don’t see on occasion today. Background objects react to being hit which some modern games still fail at. It is amazing to look back at a game that does all of these things that modern games just flat out fail at. I’m mentioning all these things because it adds to the immersion.

While ugly; Virtua Cop 2’s graphics are highly detailed for the time. The attention to detail should be praised and given an award for doing it in the bloody 1990s.

Gameplay:

I’ve never talked about a game with fewer controls than Virtua Cop except for One Finger Death Punch. Virtua Cop 2 only has 2 buttons that need to be used: Fire and reload. That’s it! You aim with the mouse, fire with the left mouse button and reload with the right. I don’t know what to say past this point. That is all of the player control. The game guides you to enemies and you click to kill them. If you hit civilians you lose a health point. That’s the full gameplay loop. True, sometimes enemies come in from weird positions like in helicopters or cars making them harder to kill but it isn’t that much of a change. It might have been better when using light guns since the light guns would remove the cursor from the gameplay, that would significantly add to the challenge which made Virtua Cop 2 an Arcade hit.

There are 3 levels in Virtua Cop 2: Beginner, Medium and Expert. The beginner level has few enemies and civilians, you can get through this level without losing a single life. The medium level has a decent number of enemies with a lot of civilians, some of them being held hostage so you need to aim well. The expert level has enemies with few civilians initially but later in the level the civilians are non-existent allowing you to shoot wild. I like the later stages of the expert level the most since I can fire wildly while taking out the opposing cunts. The medium level is truly the hardest because of the tons of unwelcome civilians which can be shot by accident making this level annoying. 

The guns are not worth talking about. The default revolver is good enough to do any job. You get revolvers, machine guns, assault rifles and magnums on the way by shooting random objects or untargeted enemies but they act the same as the standard revolver. They are completely pointless except that you can reload them less often because of their higher capacity but since the reload of the standard revolver is instant, they are completely useless.

The enemies are cannon fodder. All of them can be killed in a single hit. You can get multiple hits on them to improve your score but if you just want to beat the levels it doesn’t make sense to fill them with more holes. The bosses on the other hand are really good, there are 4 bosses (1 for each level and 1 final) with each of them needing different tactics, be it taking out their arms, shooting the stuff they throw at you or shooting their bullets out of space. I enjoyed the boss fights; they broke up the monotony of the levels by being something special. 

The game gives you 4 health and 5 credits by default, each time you take a hit you lose a health bar and when all your health bars are out you lose a credit and gain all your health back. Thankfully Virtua Cop gives you more than enough to finish the game. You have to be bad to fail overall. 

While fun to play the game is short. I finished it in around 30 minutes. That amount of time would have made Angry Joe lose his mind.

Conclusion:

Virtua Cop 2 is not for the modern crowd. It is ugly to look at, incredibly short and a little too easy with a mouse. The PC version is a downgrade from the Arcade version (at least from what I can tell from videos) at least graphically but it isn’t too much of a downgrade. It might be a lot better with a light gun but since I don’t have one on me I don’t know if it would support it or how it would run.

Since the game isn’t for sale anywhere there isn’t going to be a recommended purchase price.  I would put the price at how much you think it is worth. If you grew up with it and want to add it to your collection it might be worth to spend the new game price but if you just want to try it out, don’t spend much or pick up The Typing of The Dead: Overkill instead. The final score considering the standards of today and using the Typing of the Dead as a base I will give a final score.

Pros	Cons
Impressive special effects	Poor graphic quality
Acceptable background music	Bad and limited voice acting
Fun boss fights	Dull enemies
Multiple weapons	Weapons are pointless with mouse

Final Score: 6/10