Broken Axel

Let’s imagine you have access to the license for a popular movie franchise. You might be a small studio but you were able to snatch this up so you can make a game based on this film series. It might have been a few years since the last movie was put out but the series is still beloved so you know the game could sell if it’s done right. All you would need is the right hook to get fans in, the right gameplay to keep them interested, right? It shouldn’t be that hard to make a game based on the franchise that actually suits the license.

Well, if you played the 2006 Beverly Hills Cop game, you’d probably be surprised at just how wrong a developer could get a game. The game is functional, technically, and for the era maybe it could even be considered competent, but that’s only if you ignored the name on the box and reviewed it as a generic title. The second you take the license into account, it’s a lot hard to appreciate anything the game attempts… not that it attempts much. Despite the Beverly Hills Cop name on the package, this is just another generic, first-person shooter from the PlayStation 2 era.

Developed by Atomic Planet Entertainment, published by Blast Entertainment, and released only in Europe in 2006 (because who loves the Beverly Hills Cop franchise more than Euroipeans?), this game sees (an off-brand version of) Axel Foley (because the development team didn’t have access to Eddie Murphy’s likeness) called to Beverly Hills after his friend, Rosewood (who doesn’t look like Judge Reinhold here), goes missing while sniffing around a case. Axel first has to find Billy and rescue him, and then figure out the matters of the case (which the BVPD doesn’t want anyone investigating).

Why doesn’t the BVPD want anyone on this case? That’s never explained. Could someone on the Force be working with the bad guys? That never comes up. Instead, Axel goes through six stages, tracking down a band of, we have to assume, drug runners who are working on ferrying out a big load of the good stuff from the docks to sell overseas. And then, once that’s shut down, Axel has to find, and arrest, the men at the top and bring them to justice. Everyone else Axel meets, though, he can kill with reckless abandon. You know, because he’s a cop.

I don’t want to crap too hard on this game (despite so many reviewers before me calling this one of the worst games ever released). It is a bad game, for sure, but it’s far more competent than some titles I’ve played (once you’ve gone through Superman: The New Adventures, few games can compare). If we removed everything related to Beverly Hills Cop from this game, it would be a pretty pathetic shooter, still, but one just competent enough that you might have rented it from Blockbuster and not been too upset that you wasted five bucks on it. If you’d paid to buy the game, well… that’s a whole other matter altogether.

The simple fact is that this is a very generic stealth-and-shooting game. Each mission (outside the last one, which is all shooting) involves Axel infiltrating an area, searching around it for clues while, occasionally, talking to the goons working there. These interactions are laughable as it sees Axel, who walks everywhere with his gun drawn, talking to goons as if he was just a mechanic, or the AC repair guy, or a random bartender. I like the idea of Axel sneaking around, pretending to be various people, as that’s what he does in the movies, but doing that while his gun is out and at the ready ruins that illusion.

But while we’re at it, the interaction sequences are awful. A dialogue box will pop up and a little spinner will appear. You have to land as close to the green dot on the spinner as you can to get a good reaction from the goons. Pick a bad option, though, and things take a turn. The fact is that the spinner option is annoying. It’s not immersive, it’s gambling. It would have been better if the game could have presented you with a list of options and you have to try and guess what would be the best in the scenario. You could look around, study the area, study the guy, and then with the clues available, bluff your way through. Instead it’s all random chance and a game of luck. I hated this.

Once the mission progresses enough (which is all essentially look around until you find keys, or something like a key, so the mission can move to the next step). You eventually have to shoot your way out. The game just assumes that violence is the only course of action and so Axel is forced to mow down hundreds of guys throughout the game to get his job done. He leaves a trail of bodies in his wake that would cause Rambo to blush. I know Axel usually ends up killing a few dudes in the last section of every movie, but he’s usually not a mass murderer through and through. These sections seem out of place in the game.

In fact, the only mission that felt like something Axel would really get into was the fourth one of the game. This was the only one that didn’t give Axel a weapon, instead forcing him to talk his way past guys and perform stealth to sneak down hallways. Axel pretends to be a drug smuggler, a bartender, and a random goon to get past guys, and it at least feels truer to the character. With that said, this mission goes on way too long and is incredibly boring. The developers needed to find ways to break up the experience better to make this mission feel smoother. But then, they really needed to do that for every mission as they’re all incredibly boring.

Meanwhile, I did say the game was competent, but that’s about as far as I can go. The shoot is subpar at best, with most of the weapons feeling randomly overpowered and underpowered with no explanation. You can shoot a guy in the chest once and sometimes he’ll die, other times you can shoot him in the head over and over and it doesn’t kill him. It feels like there’s a variable damage factor at play in the game that I could never get a handle on, so I just had to keep shooting until everyone was dead, praying I killed them before they killed me.

It’s pretty clear the developers knew their shooting was funky because they dropped a ton of health pickups throughout every shooting section of the game. Presumably they knew that you couldn’t be accurate (but then, neither are the enemies) so they left a lot of health around so that once you finally got everyone down you could heal up and move on. It allows you to plow through the game without strategy or skill, but that’s not really what anyone wants from their shooting games. You can do it, but will you have fun?

Really, though, the worst part about the game is that it doesn’t have any of the trappings of Beverly Hills Cop. The developers didn’t have access to Murphy or the other actors, and that’s fair enough, but they could have at least hired an actor to base their model on, as well as one to do the lines. There’s no audio in any of the cutscenes of the game, just random text blocks. Part of the Beverly Hills Cop experience is having a funny actor deliver amusing lines while running around playing cop. Without any audio, any spoken words, anything of that nature, the whole experience feels off-off-off-brand.

But then, the developers also didn’t pay to license the “Axel F” song either, instead filling the game with very short clips of random synth music. And I do mean short as there’s technically no soundtrack to the game at all, just random ambient noise once in a while. Very rarely a 5 second clip of music will play, for no reason, but that’s it. Then the credits roll, we get a single synth song, and it’s job well done. This is not the way to handle a Beverly Hills Cop game, and even the developers of the crappy 1990 game knew this. This game fails to even rise to that level.

I think making Beverly Hills Cop into a first-person shooter is a bad idea. The films are comedic action movies with an emphasis on the comedy. That should involve a lot of character interaction (with acted cutscenes) while Axel goes around, performing a true investigation. I could see something like Deja Vu, an adventure game but this time with animation, would be more akin to what a Beverly Hills Cop game should be. You explore, you find clues, you solve a mystery. And then, at specific moments, you punctuate things with a little bit of action. This game goes the complete opposite route, being an action game first with a tiny amount of bland character interaction sprinkled in. It’s merely okay as a shooting game at all, but as a Beverly Hills Cop game, it’s a total failure.