Beverly Hills Cop (2006)

Beverly Hills Cop is a 2006 first-person shooter game based on the Beverly Hills Cop movie franchise. Released for the PlayStation 2 only in Europe, it was developed by 3rd Dimension Creations and Atomic Planet Entertainment and published by Blast! Entertainment.

Beverly Hills Cop

This game deserves a banana up it's tailpipe

Genre(s):	First-person shooter
Platform(s):	PlayStation 2
Release Date:	EU: 2006
Developer(s):	3rd Dimension Creations Atomic Planet Entertainment
Publisher(s):	Blast! Entertainment
Country:	United Kingdom
Series:	Beverly Hills Cop
Predecessor:	Beverly Hills Cop (1990)

"This is the 9/11 of video games."
— Jeff Gerstmann

Why the Heat's Not On

Axel Foley's character model looks nothing like Eddie Murphy, he's portrayed as white and they didn't even give him hair or facial hair, gave him the wrong colored jacket. Even Bad Boys: Miami Takedown has better character likeness than this game, despite that they didn't have the same voice actors.
- He looks a lot similar to Mr. Clean and Agent 47 from the Hitman series, but just with a jacket on.
The main menu looks like a generic flash game.
The theme song is cheap rip-off of the original movie's theme song by Harold Faltermeyer.
Ugly and dated graphics for 2006 standards, comparable to an early Nintendo 64 game. On that note, the water reflection in Level 3 looks terrible, and to add insult to injury, this game was released the same year as the PlayStation 3.
Awful hit detection that is comparable to Bad Boys: Miami Takedown, enemies can take dozens of shotgun rounds in the chest and still survive, in one level there is a gap on a boat where it looks like you can shoot through it but you can't because it's an invisible wall.
Terrible animations: The characters' clothing doesn't even move at all, even a bit. During the second level where you have to rescue Billy, his legs move like they are walking on a treadmill until you kill all the enemies to get him out.
Axel Foley moves so painfully slow, despite the game's controls wanting him to sprint.
There's no voice acting at all; instead, there are all dialogue converses via subtitles, showing absolute laziness.
Horrible sound effects for the weapons that sound like they are made out of toys.
- Speaking of sound effects, they are almost nonexistent, aside from the gun sounds and occasional music in the background, except that sometimes, the music will suddenly cut off for no reason.
Lots of unfixed typos in the subtitles.
The A.I. is incredibly bad. Primarily, a good example of that is the inability for enemies to shoot you while you are crouching because they weren't designed to be able to look up and down, so they just shoot above your head! You also have to crouch because when not, you will take damage very fast.
The story is so paper-thin, it's almost non-existent. In fact, the actual intro to the game is a wall of text tucked away in the manual.
The stealth missions are frustrating, unfair, and broken:
- There are times where you can shoot the enemy who spotted you before it's game over, and there are other times where killing him will still result in game over, making these sections totally unbalanced. On top of that, there are no silenced weapons to use for these sections or takedowns.
- The enemies can also randomly see you from a mile away, causing you to fail the mission; they will also often vanish, sink into the floor, or immediately come back to life after being killed.
The level objectives are often made to be as tedious as possible (backtracking halfway through levels to pick up items the game only now informs you of) and often make no logical sense to finish the first level you have to get gas from a gas pump and use it on a specific car to use as a getaway - even though another car in the same level already has gas and Axel could just leave the building on foot.
The first level has nothing to do with the rest of the game and accomplishes nothing. However, strangely enough, it is the only level in the game to actually be based on anything from any of the films.
The analog sensitivity is horrible, making shooting stuff a chore.
Repetitive and lazy level design - most of the levels are set in the docks, and the fifth level is just a series of fetch quests with nothing else to actually do in terms of action; it's also set in a nightclub.
There are no checkpoints in this game, meaning that once you fail a level, you have to restart it from the very beginning.
The conversation mechanic advertised on the back of the box boils down to making a spinning wheel stop and hoping it lands on the green-colored chambers. While it can be useful here and there, sometimes, it's downright useless. Even if you manage to get three correct speeches, in some situations, the game is scripted so the enemies would still open fire to you, like in the first level. What's the point of being forced to use this mechanic when they will open fire regardless?
- False advertising: The back of the box also claims that with the conversation mechanic, Axel can talk his way out of fighting enemies, which is a lie because there are no branching situations, like with the mentioned conversation in the first level, where even if you succeed, you will get into a gunfight anyway. Just one screw up during the minigame can result in a Mission Failure.
The last part of the game is so poorly designed, you'll keep failing the mission with no clear reason as to why.
- The reason for this is that you would think that to finish the last level you have to kill Sebastian Kayakov, or Sevastian as the game calls him, is by shooting right at him as the cutscene points out, but NO! What you actually have to do is shoot the helicopter Sebastian is trying to escape until a cutscenes appears.
Unskippable cutscenes, especially problematic in the 1st level, which begins with a 35 second-long cutscene the game forces you to watch every time you restart.
The lack of content and quality can probably be explained by the fact that this PS2 game, in 2006, was printed on a CD instead of a DVD. Oh, and did we mention that when extracted, the ROM of the game is around 100MB in total? This was made for the PS2, not the PS1.

The Only Redeeming Quality

Recently, this game got a mouse injector that can be used to play it with mouse and keyboard on PC, using PCSX2 and the external mouse injector.

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