Virtua Cop
Sega Saturn
1996. Blockbuster Video. 14 year-old Dan furiously pedaling home on his bicycle with a copy of Virtua Cop in his backpack. Life was good. I had the game for three days, and I played it endlessly over the course of that weekend. 26 years later, those three days remain my only experience with the game. I'd later go on to purchase Virtua Cop 2, which I still like to pop in from time to time. But the original Virtua Cop? It's been a minute, to say the least.
Due to the how difficult it is to get your hands on Saturn games these days, I never thought I'd be able to play this game again. Enter emulation. This is one of those cases where I don't feel guilty about emulating one tiny bit. I'm just glad to be able to play the game.
Would Virtua Cop stand up 26 years after my last experience with it? Let's dive in, shall we?
Story:
I'm sure Virtua Cop has some kind of storyline to it. If so, it is never explained in-game. You play as a cop (or a pair of cops if you are playing this with a second player). You make your way through three stages, shooting bad guys and eventually taking down the head honcho of whatever crime syndicate you're trying to bring down. The end.
Gameplay:
This is a very simple game. You don't have any control over your character. You just move a cursor around on the screen. This cursor represents your gun's sight. When an enemy pops up, you shoot them. Double-tap the reload button to reload your weapon when you are out of bullets - or pre-emptively, which I found myself constantly doing as I made my way through the game. More bad guys will pop up, and you shoot them. Occasionally an innocent civilian will appear in your line of fire. You want to avoid shooting them, or you will lose one of your lives.
You can tackle the game's three stages in any order you want. I just play them from easiest to hardest. At the end of each stage is a boss character. I actually found the medium stage's boss character to be the hardest, probably because of the respawning enemies that show up while the boss is hiding from you.
If you notice the colored ring around the enemies that is shown in some of these screenshots, you may wonder what that represents. It's actually a timer of sorts. When the ring turns red, the enemy will fire at you, and likely hit you. So you want to aim for enemies with the ring around them first before firing at other enemies on the screen. Ignore them, and you'll likely be dealt some damage.
One thing I liked about the game when it was first released, which seems silly now, is how interactive the environments are. I constantly found myself shooting at windows, barrels, and parked cars - often to the detriment of my own character's health. You have no idea how many times I'd be firing away at some windows when an enemy would pop up on the other side of the screen and shoot me before I could reload and move my cursor over there. Never learned my lesson, though. Shooting at things is just too much fun! And you never know when they'll be hiding a secret weapon or item.
Speaking of secret weapons, as I said they usually appear when you destroy a box or something in the background. The only useful weapon I found was the automatic. It's so fun mowing down enemies one after the another after another. You can pick up a magnum or a shotgun but they seem to work the exact same way your handgun does. I never really saw the point, but I still went out of my way to collect them. If you get shot once, though, you lose your weapon. So be alert!
The default setting in this game is three lives with three continues, which is ridiculous. You'll burn through all of those halfway through the game. There's just no way to avoid getting shot sometimes. Usually I tend to play a game using its default settings, the way it is intended to be played, but in this instance I cranked it up to nine lives and nine continues. I'm never going to be a master of this game, and I am okay with that.
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Graphics:
This game looks really good. There's none of that blotchy pixelization or ugliness that plagues a lot of games from the 32-bit era. Everything is very smooth and colorful and cartoon-like. I enjoy all the enemy animations, and how they react differently depending on where you shoot them.
This is going to be a weird thing to compliment, but I like the reflective surfaces in this game. Like when you see the background reflected in car windows or shiny surfaces. This effect is used the most in the medium stage. I don't know why, but I really enjoy seeing this.
I'm weird. I know. You don't have to tell me.
Sound:
This game sounds very good, too. The stage music is catchy. The sound of gunshots isn't too loud and obtrusive. I like the little yells of agony from the computer characters when you shoot them. The bad guys and the civilians. This whole game just has that classic mid-90s Sega feel to its music, as well as its graphics. And that is a good thing.
Overall:
I had an enjoyable, if very short, time with this game. Cranking your credits and lives up to nine apiece was definitely the way to go for me. I can't fathom trying to trial and error my way through this game with the default number of lives and credits. No thanks.
One minor complaint I have is the reload button. You have to tap it twice in order to reload, and I swear to the almighty that this feature doesn't work sometimes. Half my deaths in this game were because I ran out of bullets in the middle of a fierce firefight, I double-tapped reload to fill my bullets, and then when I tried to shoot the next wave of enemies it said I still needed to reload. And then I'd get shot. I don't recall having this problem with Virtua Cop 2. Do you just have to press the reload button once in that game? I definitely feel that would have been the way to go in this one.
As I alluded to, this is a short game. I didn't set a timer or anything as I played, but I can imagine that this didn't take me any longer than 45 minutes to complete - if that. I can't imagine paying 50 or 60 bucks for this game back in the day, for something that only lasted 45 minutes. Maybe you can stretch some replay value out of this game by changing the difficulty or trying to master the game on a more limited number of lives. But that's not for me. I'm sure this game is fun to play with a second player as well, but you know me - I'm single player all the way. I can imagine that this adds some replay value to the game, though.
All in all this is a fun and charming little game. It's very shallow and doesn't offer much in the way of variety, so I can't give it too high a score. But it's nonstop fun from start to finish, which is a lot more than you can say about most games out there. Can I recommend Virtua Cop to anyone else? Yes, especially if you like light gun shooters. If not, you probably won't be missing anything if you decide pass on this one.
THE GRADE:
B-
If you liked this review, please check out some of my other game reviews:
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