Who’s this craven miseryguts going around saying there’s a release drought on? In triple-A, maybe. All the big money industry’s given us lately is Annapurna’s smash hit bumhole licking simulator and that one Smash Bros knockoff where Shaggy from Scooby Doo beats up the Muppet Babies or whatever. But the indie and midlevel sector are killing it right now. Killing it and stuffing it and mounting it on the mantlepiece to make uncomfortable eye contact with dinner guests. I’ve played tons of interesting games lately. There was even a full on Soulslike. Thymesia. It kinda sucks, but it’s there. For want of some unique spin on the combat it came up with this whole thing where you stab the baddies but then you have to stab them with your secondary weapon to make the first stab happen for realsies, and I kinda bounced off that. Felt like the exact opposite of streamlining the process. Brought back too many unpleasant memories from when I used to work in data validation. But elsewhere there’s been plenty of innovative new ideas that have paid off. Cult of the Lamb, management sim with added death. Rollerdrome, Tony Hawk’s pro skater with added death. Cursed To Golf, golf simulator with – actually I’ve just noticed the common thread, there.
Alright, how’s this for innovation: a retro-style boomer shooter with subtracted death. Yeah, that popped a few monocles, didn’t it. And so we come to Fashion Police Squad. A first person shooter – oh, FPS, Fashion Police Squad, that was a sneaky one – in which we pacify hordes of pixel art sprite enemies by altering their clothes to be more flattering, thus removing their hostile instincts. So between this and Cult of the Lamb we could have called this “light-hearted fascist authoritarian enforcement of conformity season.” But let’s not read too much into Fashion Police Squad, because its tongue couldn’t go any further into its cheek without causing some kind of rupture. In a utopian fashion-obsessed future city we play a sort of gender-swapped Grace Jones who is a cop on patrol for fashion crimes, with a dye gun for adding life to drab business suits and a sewing needle gun that somehow only targets baggy trousers and not eyeballs. And I know what you’re going to say. “Yahtzee, you are a warm hunk of red hot animal charisma and I need you slamming up against my love crevices pronto. But before you do that, isn’t this mechanically just your standard FPS with non-violent language pasted on?
All you’re doing is shooting baddies until they stop moving. Just with bullets replaced with sewing needles and corpses replaced with grateful conformists now being accepted into society. Well, sort of, but don’t write Fashion Police Squad off so easily. It’s a game with hidden depths and a lot of imagination that I rather enjoyed. And it does do some interesting stuff with the mechanics in that each enemy can only be defeated by a specific gun. The dye gun isn’t going to do shit to Mr. Ill Fitting Suit except give him the chance to audition as a pride parade flag. The only thing a sewing needle gun can to do to a bloke in a speedo is, absolute best case scenario, inflict a vasectomy. It creates a more formalised version of the usual FPS gameplay of having to pick the right tool for the job from moment to moment, and sometimes requires a little intuition when a new enemy shows up and you have to deduce that their specific fashion crime involves footwear and as such calls for the use of your sock gnomes. Yeah, that joke didn’t really land for me. Bit of a non-sequitur. And throwing things just isn’t as satisfying as a gun, especially throwing 2D sprites in a 3D world where the physics interaction upon landing is going to be like two hummingbirds having a slap fight.
Combat can actually get pretty bloody hard, especially near the end, when you’re getting towel flicked and atomic wedgied from all sides trying to pick a target and remember if you’re supposed to use the steam iron or the hair straighteners first. But then the game gives you a rocket launcher that corrects all fashion mistakes instantly and the bottom rather drops out of the game’s trousers. Ammo’s limited, but disappointingly it’s the only weapon you can use against the final boss. So much for intuiting how to apply everything we’ve learned, no, it’s basically just the Icon of Sin again but wearing flared trousers and shutter shades. So while we’re nitpicking, let’s talk about the special traversal mechanics. They suck. Well, that’s a pretty fucking big nit for a boomer shooter, gonna have to break out the cattle forceps for that one. There are poles you have to swing off by snapping your belt at them, and this is another thing that doesn’t work very well with 2D sprites in a 3D environment. The physics of it are very janky and inconsistent, and when we’re forced to do it to advance in the level it’s like going out with a moody girlfriend.
“Hey! Why aren’t I perfectly centralized in your field of vision at all times? You’re looking at that whore peripheral vision of yours! Into the bottomless pit with you!” And to this we later add the ability to go superfast by switching to the laundry gun and hosing down the floor in front of us, which fits as naturally into standard movement as a chronically flatulent direwolf into an earnest conversation about civil liberties. And anyway, platforming in a 2.5D first person shooter is a painful prospect even before you’ve coated the floor in Fairy Liquid. Frankly the more I think about it the more complaints I have for the actual gameplay of Fashion Police Squad, and yet, I enjoyed the game and was absorbed to the end. Its sense of humour and visual flair can distract from a lot. It’s like I went to a convention afterparty and we all got drunk and hit the clubs and karaoke and it’s only after I got home and ate the hideous thing I found congealing in some tupperware that I realised that I hated the fucking guts of every single person I hung out with tonight. Don’t be fooled by the retro aesthetic – pixel art aside the environments are actually really nicely detailed. Probably why a single level will copy paste the same back alley and corridor nineteen fucking times.
But the point is the game has as fantastic a sense of aesthetics as one should reasonably expect of a game that wants to dictate how everyone should dress. It’s not a very long game and that’s good, because it means the energy level never drops and it’s able to keep surprising us with new ideas right up to the final encounter, in which the villain boards a giant helicopter shaped like a stiletto and it’s absolutely spectacular, pixel art be damned. I love the boss fights, the animations, the end of level status screen where we watch every enemy we refashionized come out of a giant prison door and strut about on a catwalk as lights flash and the camera moves about like a drunk swingball set on a teacup ride, and if the pace let up for a single moment to give us a chance to think we’d probably feel embarrassed by how stupid it all is, but it never does. Sound design’s great, too. You fix an enemy’s turnups and there’s a puff of fireworks and a perfectly comically timed pause before the enemy goes “Thank you, kind stranger!” with deliberately low quality audio. And this is like the battery in my TV remote or complimenting my wife’s appearance when she’s mad at me. I don’t have a fucking clue why it always works, but I’m not about to question it.
