Future Cop: L.A.P.D.

"In the 21st Century, criminal gangs have seized territory in the world's major cities. As a cop in this future your job is to put them out of business. Your beat is the mean streets of L.A. where standard weapons just won't get it done your survival depends on massive firepower. Fortunately you possess the world's most revolutionary assault vehicle. With the ability to transform from agile hovercraft to powerful walker, you're equipped with everything you need to get the job done: the latest plasma technology ceramite armour and a very bad attitude. Your mission: Serve Protect, Survive."

Future Cop in it's early stages was known as Future Strike with it's trailer included at the end of Nuclear Strike. I guess by the time the game was finished it had transitioned into something notably different from the previous strike games and thus renamed as Future Cop and completely separate.

Future Cop takes place over eight mission in its Crime War Mode. Each mission is a simple traverse the maze and flick switches to open doors affair with the goal of killing the end boss to complete the stage. You do this by controlling your transforming mech vehicle and taking care of any weapons, vehicles and enemies that are in your way using a selection of weapons. You hold three weapons at a time, much like the strike games but here you can unlock new weapons as you progress and equip which ever you want. As you progress through the levels there are reloader points where you will be awarded with more ammo or shield energy. It is not random so you can learn where pickups are. As the game allows two player co-op their are quite a lot of reloader points. each time you complete a level you are awarded with an ending fmv. At any point you can transform between the upright and ground vehicle modes. The vehicle mode hovers so you can go over mines as well as moving at speed, but you get far better control in upright mode. There is no lives limit so no Game Over but should you lose all energy and die, you will be sent back to the beginning of the level and it will have reset requiring you to destroy everything again. This can get tiring fast especially if you have made it to the boss. Also not that there is no scoring of any kind.

The second part of the game is Precinct Assault which has six maps made up of ten levels. You need to complete all levels to complete the map. The sixth map is a bug level unlocked by completing the previous five maps. This mode is a take on the tower defence game where you need to activate guns and purchase tanks and planes to roam the level, defeating the opposition and finally take the enemy base all while the opposition is trying to do the same to you. There are outposts near each base from which to buy the tanks and planes from but there cost double. The Super Tank and Air fortress are very costly and can only be bought at the main base. In two player vs mode, the rules are the same. In single player you face Sky Captain who gets progressively more difficult as you go through each of the ten levels. Sky Captain doesnt play by the same rules and can purchase vehicles at any time and doesnt need actually earn any of it's points to spend. It can be a real pain when you are waiting for your tanks to get up to his base and he is able to destroy them instantly buy purchasing defence without him going out to get points. In the later levels he respawn so fast when destroyed it can be difficult to keep him out of the way while your slow moving tanks move in. Killing sky captain awards ten points. dying costs ten points.

The longplay shows playing though all eight missions including the briefing sequencies. In stages 2,4,6 I also show collecting the secret weapons although I don't use them in the initial playthrough. The credits are shown after the main game is complete. Part 2 shows Precinct Assault mode. All six maps in full, not just cheat jumping to the final levels. Boring yes, but it shows how long it can take to complete not that my play through is by any means optimal. I may have been able to save a lot of time by not purchasing outposts and just using the heavy vehicles but they are not invincible. My sole strategy is to just try and get in quick and keep sky captain near his own base in defence. Nothing extra is earned for playing through this mode. I switch it to easy to try to make the segment shorter but I don't think the setting has any effect on this mode of the game. I found Venice the most difficult due to the large map and spread out turret points and maybe not an optimal weapon loadout. The first level I just use the secret weapons but those K9s are to slow to be useful and again with few capture points it takes me while to get through although I think I could shave maybe 40 mins from the longplay playing like I do in the later levels.

Overall, this is a great game , well presented and different enough from the Strike games to stand out as it's own thing. Sadly though we didn't get any more Future Cop games. The game starts of easy enough to draw you in but later stages can require a bit more thought as even though the level maps are small, you get to climb platforms reaching upper areas of the same map area as you go around and can be easy to get a little lost in some stages. The overhead Map tells you where you need to be but not how to get there although there is a fullscreen map that may help a little.

Part 1: Crime War
00:00:00 Intro
00:02:55 ZONE 1 - Griffith Park
00:14:25 ZONE 2 - Zuma Beach
00:23:50 ZONE 3 - La Brea Tar Pits
00:35:35 ZONE 4 - Venice Beach
00:50:20 ZONE 5 - Hell's Gate Prison
01:01:50 ZONE 6 - Studio City
01:13:35 ZONE 7 - LAX Spaceport
01:29:00 ZONE 8 - Long Beach
01:46:44 Credits

Part 2: Precinct Assault
00:00:00 Intro
00:01:55 Urban Jungle
00:58:16 Venice Beach
02:04:51 La Cantina
02:39:02 Hollywood Keys
03:14:28 Proving Ground
03:52:25 Bug Hunt
04:25:35 Credits

Note: In game fmv sequencies have odd little gfx glitches I couldn't avoid. Just the way emulation, windows or the game is decoding the original mpg files. Moving them from the cd image to hd didn't help. For the full screen fmv's I have directly converted the fmv direct from the original mpg files. It wasn't feasible to do the same for the smaller briefing in game videos. Just to add to the pain, the original disc image I used had a bug with files having short truncated file names so some videos didn't load, sigh. Avoid "Future Cop - L.A.P.D. (USA) (Rerelease)"