Pretend you're a police officer. You discover that a group of people -- let's call them the Syndicate -- is preventing another group of people -- say, mutant fugitives -- from going back to their hideout. You're going to help the mutants. The Syndicate soldiers are just standing around the streets between the mutants and their destination. What do you do? Start a conversation with the Syndicate men? Try to negotiate? Arrest them if they don't comply?

In Cops 2170: The Power of Law, you walk up to the Syndicate operatives and shoot them point-blank. Don't expect much in the way of police procedure in this mesh of an RPG and a turn-based tactical shooter (a la XCOM: UFO Defense. As much as I'd like to say that Cops 2170 is as enjoyable as that venerable classic, it comes up short on a few counts.

Cops is certainly a highly playable game, with a mostly intriguing plot and some interesting action. Mission locations are huge, with lots of nooks and crannies to explore and boxes to open for bonus goodies and people to talk to (in order to further your investigations). And, of course, bad guys to shoot. You play Katy, a rookie officer whom, from the first mission, is torn between playing a by-the-book cop or joining a secret order of police officers who believe themselves above the law (and act accordingly). You're also faced with another decision: to help those mutants, or to gun them down and take the side of the Syndicate. The various choices result in branching plotlines.

The missions usually first involve killing every bad guy on the map and then looking for key NPCs to converse with. Sadly, the conversations are longwinded, could have benefited from a good deal of editing, and are poorly translated from Russian (the game's original language) with comically bad voice acting. And yet somehow, this doesn't ruin the game -- it creates a goofy air of kitsch reminiscent of John Waters' movies. (On that note, I should mention that there are giant rats armed with guns in the game. You've been warned!)

Getting started in Cops is a nightmare of trial-and-error guesswork. You're simply dropped into Katy's shoes in the police headquarters with absolutely no tutorial or coaching. It's like one of those games in which your character wakes up with amnesia: you don't know who to talk to, where to go, how to start a mission, or anything else. (The limited instruction manual doesn't help a whole lot, as it's poorly structured and jumps around. I had to read through the tiny print of the key reference page to figure out how to do basic things, like changing a character's facing without moving her.) Eventually, I figured out how to engage the first mission, recruit a couple of squad members, and go to work. But even then, I couldn't decipher out how to end the opening mission even after I'd killed the bad guys and talked to everyone on the map. The mission goals, detailed in the diary on your character's PDA-like device, could be a hell of a lot clearer.

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