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G Police was one of the first games I saw for the Playstation. I thought it had a really cool concept, but the execution left me bored within minutes. The controls seemed too sloppy, and the game was difficult for me to get into. Needless to say, I didn’t play it for long. It certainly wasn’t the kind of game I’d expect to have a sequel. Fast forward a few years and I find G Police 2 in my mailbox. One of the most surprising things about it is that it resembles the original so closely. I had hoped there would have been some major changes.

For those of you who don’t know, in G Police and G Police 2 you play the part of a government police pilot whose job it is to find crime and eliminate it. In the original, the enemy was a large corporation. In the sequel, the enemy is the large number of crime syndicates that have appeared in the wake of the fallen corporations.

So what was wrong with the original, and what failed to be fixed in the sequel? I’m glad you asked. Gameplay:

G Police 2 puts you in the cockpit of a jet powered helicopter, armed to the teeth with weapons ranging from machine guns and missiles to lasers and napalm bombs. The judicial system has fallen apart, and the police have turned into a military organization, dispensing lethal justice wherever a crime is committed.

It sounds like a nice, dark setting for a game, doesn’t it? Everything seems fine right until you actually start playing. The controls are extremely sensitive. Your fighter accelerates very quickly, and the turning speed is almost beyond controllable. Once you get comfortable enough to fly around the city without crashing into buildings left and right, you can actually begin your first mission.

The level of interactivity with the environment is very low in G Police 2. For the most part all you do is fly around blowing enemies up. As each wave of opponents is destroyed, a new one appears in another section of the map, and you must rush to destroy them.

There’s nothing wrong with a shooter as long as it is done well, but the dogfights in G Police 2 were very difficult to enjoy. Your weapons have a limited firing period, after which they must cool down before they can be used again. In addition, it is very difficult to score a hit on an opponent unless he is very close to you, which means that you have to match speed and course with your target so that you can get off enough shots to destroy him.

The enemies generally fly at about half of your top speed, though, so you must repeatedly push on the accelerator in order to avoid overshooting your target, but you have to make sure to give enough gas to keep up. Since your guns overheat so easily, you can’t just hold down the fire button. Instead you have to push it a bunch of times while you’re pushing the accelerator and trying to steer. The whole combination requires a lot of coordination and it really took me away from the game. I was paying more attention to how I was pushing buttons on my controller than to the task of killing the bad guys.

One of the main plot devices of the early missions was for the enemy to “hack” into your computer and give you false orders or change your sensor readings to indicate something that wasn’t really there. As cheesy as this was, the worst part was that it sometimes happened several times during a single mission! The whole thing felt like: “Kill those guys. Your communications were hacked into! Go scan these guys and destroy contraband. Oh, your scanners were hacked into! Look, there are some more enemies coming!” And so on.

Load times were also pretty horrendous. To keep players from getting bored, a screen was displayed with little blue rectangles flying across it. Maybe that entertains some people, but I’d rather skip the long loads and just get on with the game.

Another load-related issue was with the saved games. If you successfully completed a mission in a certain way, it would give you access to the same mission in Hard mode. After playing through eighteen missions, I decided to let our editor try his hand at the game, so I loaded up my saved game and got him started on mission 1 in hard mode. After getting used to the controls, he walked all over the level, and then asked me if I wanted to save the game. I figured no harm would come from it, right? WRONG. After he saved the game, I could only play in easy mode for every mission after mission 1. In other words, it took all my hard work and threw it down the drain. Wonderful.

On the plus side, there are a number of different vehicles available throughout the game, with my favorite being the Raptor. It really cut through the bad guys, although it made the missions with it almost too easy because it automatically tracked opponents and its gun is able to shoot for extended periods of time without cooling down.

One neat feature that is included with the game is a gallery of production sketches and renderings that were used to produce the game. You can see how conceptual drawings turned into final forms. I really, really dig behind-the-scenes looks like this, so I was really pleased to see this addition.

After the first eleven missions, I was really losing hope for G Police 2’s longevity rating. Each of the missions had lasted an average of 11 minutes a piece, and with a total of 30 missions I was afraid that there would be only a little more than 5 hours of play to this game.

Fortunately, the later missions proved me wrong, but although the average mission time increased to only about fifteen or eighteen minutes, I actually died a couple times, forcing me to repeat a couple missions. The first eleven posed no real difficulty for me, though. That’s 1/3 of the missions gone in no time, flat.

As I mentioned before, the controls in G Police 2 are pretty bad. The turning speed is so fast that when an enemy flies by, it is difficult to track it. Instead I found myself overshooting it by a long shot. The rapid acceleration didn’t help, either. Ground targets were always a pain because if I remained stationary and fired at them, they would either blow me away or get out of range. If I tried to move to follow them I would overshoot them because they barely moved compared to me.

Finally, the combination of trying to bang on x, square, and circle all at the same time while steering with my other hand proved to be too much. In all the excitement, I also pressed R1 a lot when I meant to press L1. Unfortunately, L1 makes you gain altitude, while R1 cycles through your secondary weapons. The text on your secondary weapon selection system is so small that you have to take your attention away from the combat just to select a weapon, but more about that in the graphics section…

The graphics in G Police were dark and too blue, but overall they were pretty good for the time. Unfortunately, pretty good for a couple years ago doesn’t do much to impress an audience of today. The graphics are still way too dark, and an abundance of blues all melt together into a mush of obstacles to be avoided.

The Playstation also can’t handle G Police 2’s graphical demands properly. Instead of creating slowdown, distant polygons are drawn as bounding boxes to save rendering power. (Bounding boxes are just vector cubes as seen in arcade games from the early 80’s) The distance this happens at isn’t terribly great, either, so expect to see the ground in front of you literally appearing before your eyes. No polygon is safe from the bounding box effect, so if enemies got too far away, they ceased to be ships and instead became floating squares.

For some reason, G Police 2 follows the current trend of using tiny text on the TV during missions. Unfortunately, the text is so small that there’s just no way to read it without straining. To make matters worse, a lot of the tiny text is in red, which is a color that is well known for bleeding (no pun intended) and creating a real mush on the screen. As I mentioned in the controls section, I found myself concentrating too hard on just trying to select my secondary weapon, and because the R1 button only allows you to rotate through them one way, you may have to cycle through multiple times to bring up the weapon you’re after.

The worst part about the graphics is the nauseating blur effect. I brought the game to our editor after having endured it for many hours, but he wasn’t able to play for more than fifteen minutes. Very early into the second mission, he put down the controller and announced that he couldn’t take it anymore.

The sound arena is a mixed bag. On the one hand, G Police 2 gets big points for supporting Dolby Pro Logic surround sound. It’s really cool to hear what’s going on behind you.

On the down side, there wasn’t a whole lot worth listening to. The gun and explosion sounds are standard fare, neither bad nor outstanding. The background music during missions is somewhat atmospheric with car alarms and sirens mixed in with a little music, but I found that it had an almost pulsing rhythm to it that added to my sense of nausea, so I was forced to turn the music off after playing through a couple missions. The music that plays upon the completion of a mission was just downright bad… So bad that it actually made me laugh.

Finally, there is voice acting in G Police 2. The narration of the plot was decent. It was only slightly cheesy, like someone trying to imitate the voice over at the end of Terminator 2, but going that little bit too far. By video game standards it’s pretty good, though – it’s definitely light years beyond the stuff that makes you cringe just to hear it.

The mission briefing woman is horrible, though. She sounds so completely bored with what she’s saying that she made me bored with it. There is absolutely no emotion in her voice at all. She also speaks very slowly, so it is nearly impossible to concentrate on reading the briefing with her babbling away in the background. It’s easier just to skip the whole thing.

G Police 2 is, overall, an average game. It definitely has fun value, but compared to a lot of the games out there it just can’t hold its own. Because of its similarities to the original, if you liked G Police, you’ll like this. It does have some nice improvements over the first game, but there’s nothing spectacular to speak of. The blur effect really doesn’t help matters any, because it takes a so-so game and makes it really difficult to play. Hopefully we’ll see another try at the G Police series on the Playstation 2, with extended gameplay features and better graphics. After playing G Police 2, though, I can’t say that further sequel prosepects seem very good.