‘Fashion Police Squad’ Review: The Groom Forever

THis introduction is probably going to land me in the government registry, but when I play first-person shooters, I like my enemies to bleed. There are many layers to a good FPS design, the feel of the movement, the design of the levels, the weight of your weapons. But it’s hard to ignore the pure catharsis of turning someone trying to kill you into a quivering pile of explosives. Painting the walls with your enemies’ insides is one of the great joys of FPS games, and if a shooter allows us to corner the red in the distance, the better.

is to Fashion police teamThankfully, during my time with it I rarely missed the gore and giblets associated with the genre. This retro-styled shooter sees you use your colorful arsenal to fix your enemies’ fashion crimes, painting charcoal suits with paint-blasting guns and belting baggy pants. It’s a gimmick that can be easily run from the seam on a second-hand pair of boxer shorts. But there is an impressive amount of substance backup. Fashion police teamA sense of style.

You play as Sergeant Des, a dapper (if slightly faded) outfit assigned to fight the fashion crime that plagues the city. The streets are crowded with incomplete clothes, socks-in-shoes, and blindly screaming shirts. As Des, you’ll have to fend off flying bags and high-speed electric scooters as you try to get the measure of these devious scoundrels, while dishing out justice with an array of fashionable gadgets.

The hook of the Fashion police teamA gun game is that each weapon is aimed at solving a specific fashion crime. So while your 2-Dye-4 Elite is perfect for solving color-based crimes, smart drab suits and loud shirts, it’s useless against an enemy with a bad temper. For those enemies, you should switch to your Tailormade, which will overwhelm opponents in no time.

The danger of this FPS style is that it feels like it forces you into a deadly matchmaking game instead of forcing you to figure out the best way to fight enemies. The Fashion Police Squad doesn’t completely escape this – the first stages can feel somewhat binary. But as the weaponry and enemy list expands, the issue becomes more blurred. Pick up the Wet’Ones, a sud gun that’s in vogue a few hours into the game to take down enemies. But Wet’Ones high-pressure detergent spray is useful for reducing baggy clothes.

Developer Mopeful Games has clearly figured out how to satisfy a demon’s entire respiratory system by fixing clothing hazards like exploding their ribs from behind. Weapons have the weight and feedback that a good shooter needs, while some, like shotguns, only paint the walls with paint instead of digestive fluids. When an enemy’s health reaches zero, their fashion crime is unleashed in a puff of smoke, gurgling, Unreal competition– Style advertiser makes proclamations like “cool” or “voguish”. It’s fun, but it’s also fun.

Fashion police team It’s also an amazing action shooter. Your belt, for example, isn’t just for whipping baggy pants into shape. It can also be grappled to flagpoles, allowing you to swing through gaps and up to high peaks. This move has a powerful impulse behind it that brings to mind jumping on and off Skyrails. Bioshock Infinite. Mopeful Games applies this mechanic to some liberating platforming challenges, as you jump between balconies and perilously high skyscrapers. Wet’Ones, meanwhile, have a secondary function that lubricates the front surface, speeding up your movement. This allows you to jump much larger gaps, which in turn allows Mopeful Games to get more creative with level design.

Regarding level design, Fashion police teamMaps are colorful, colorful affairs, brighter, breezy Duke Nukem 3d. Just like the mechanics at the core of the game, the levels become more interesting as you progress. For example, one mission is set on a subway train, and at first it looks like a straightforward, linear gauntlet. But he quickly reveals himself to be much more snakey and interesting. There is a recurring problem with the map design, however, most levels include a fair amount of backtracking. Sometimes the game tries to mitigate this by sprinkling new enemies on your return trip. Other times, though, it doesn’t bother you at all, leaving you to wander through places that feel retro.

This isn’t the only loose stitch. Fashion police teamDress. At the start of the game when you defeat an enemy they will be transparent, the enemies in the area will stay that way until they are hit. The purpose, as far as I can tell, is to stop defeated enemies from clouding the battlefield. This would make perfect sense. That victory enemies essentially disappear will damage the changing body of fashion crime solving a little bit.

The FPS also has a surprisingly strong narrative thrust, with the game’s story presented through text-based dialogue between Sergeant Des and various other characters. The writing is decent in its own right, poking gentle fun at both shooter convention and an appropriately light-hearted tone against the game’s own bleak novel. But these dialogue interruptions affect the broader flow of the levels, lending them an annoyingly halting quality.

Fashion police team It launches on August 15 for PC.