In all the years I’ve played Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom I never considered that this would be a game. Sure those games were reskinned by modders, and one was sold as Super 3D Noah’s Ark, which was officially licensed by id Software too. Fashion Police Squad in some ways is a successor to games like id Software’s original first person shooters. It’s a blast that feels like it’s from the past.
Fashion Police Squad is a retro first person shooter comedy. You play as Sergeant Des and you target crimes against fashion. Your targets range from grey dull suits, to socks with sandals, and even baggy jeans. To deal with these targets you use your arsenal of weapons dependent on the crime like shooting colour at dull suits, to shooting gnomes at socks with sandals, and using a whip on baggy jeans. Weapons will only work against the right crime, so you will be switching on the fly. A lot of the comedy is in the form of corny dad jokes. It’s humorous at the end of a firefight when each enemy has turned fashionable and there are words above them like “SEXY”. There are thirteen missions and each will take around fifteen to twenty minutes.
The first level is hilarious as you jump into a fresh feeling retro game with a comedy gimmick. This goes away quickly for the next few missions as the level design feels bland and repetitive. The early missions look the same, and you are just learning new enemy types. These missions act like a lengthy tutorial. Once you get halfway through the game every level is well designed and looks dramatically different from the rest, the story grabs you and you feel compelled to do the next mission. The second half of the game is so much fun it’s as if they had gone back to the first level and padded the beginning to extend the playtime. The bosses are innovative and spoof other popular games. The whip is the saving grace for this game feeling different and exciting. You use the whip as a grapple hook and traverse sections like that. This could be the difficulty spike that makes it harder for some players, but there are difficulty settings you can change to lower it.
There is nothing groundbreaking about Fashion Police Squad. I liked it. The best thing about the game is how much it feels like an old school first person shooter. If you like the retro pixel art aesthetic from the game and FPS’s you should like this game. The main annoyance of the game comes to certain sections where you are forced to swap your weapons constantly to defeat waves of enemies. By the end of the game I would be interested to see the developers make a sequel that plays with the following generation of game technology. Prices are all over the place with games these days on the PlayStation Network, however this one gets it’s price point right.
Available now on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
Robert Ring
KissTheGames 