Blaster Cop

If it weren’t a completely pointless activity, someone could probably lose an entire weekend trying to count all the action movies that feature maverick cops or off-the-reservation detectives. Although everyone expects policemen to be responsible and always make the right choices, seeing John McClane ignore all the rules and basically destroy an entire city in a single car chase has the public cheering wildly.

Blaster Cop is a retro first-person shooter that puts you face-to-face with a variety of bad guys in a dangerous city. There’s not much depth in terms of story or characters, but you can tell that the game tries to maintain a certain mood throughout the adventure. Hence, the cyberpunk atmosphere keeps you engaged, not to mention the pretty high difficulty level that doesn’t let you relax for too long.

The whole thing is designed to look and feel like Doom or Wolfenstein in terms of interface, which means that the environments are more or less three-dimensional, but everything in them is two-dimensional, including the enemies. Thus, you can only rotate the camera on the X axis, which can be a tad too counterintuitive for modern gamers.

Your character can carry multiple weapons throughout the game, some of which are more devastating than others. They all require ammunition except for the double pistols, on the other hand, so it’s important to keep an eye on your bullets and remember to collect more whenever enemies drop them. Speaking of which, the enemies are fairly straightforward, but some can be pretty annoying every now and again.

Boss fights are quite tough too, depending on the difficulty level chosen at the beginning of the game. Most of them feature simple patterns you have to learn in order to avoid their attacks and retaliate, but the formula is as addictive as ever. The actual graphics are not too bad either, and a lot can be said about the soundtrack as well, since it contributes a lot to the atmosphere.

In the end, Blaster Cop is a great throwback to a much simpler age, and it actually gets a lot of things right in terms of gameplay. You are always struggling to stay alive, which is something that nowadays is pretty rare in shooters.