Rebel Cops Review

Rebel Cops is a fresh take on Weappy Studio’s 2016 hit This Is The Police. The game has you oversee a group of renegade cops, rebelling against the almost total control a mob boss has over their small town. This game takes more strategy than its predecessors since you must now manage a limited inventory of people and items to use for your cause. The player must also do what they can to stay in good standing with the public, or they might miss out on opportunities to buy goods or find new recruits for the cause.

The game focuses a lot on management, between managing equipment in the menus, managing your stockpile with the trader, and most importantly, keeping your cops safe in the field. If you are into turn based strategy games or management games in the slightest, I'm confident you’ll have fun with this game. Most of the gameplay is focused on the missions, with the other menus and management leading up to the scenarios you will run through with your cops. The missions consist of a set-up, where you will choose which officers will go on the job, and more importantly what precious little equipment they will bring with them.

After setting up, your cops drop into the field and you direct them to their objectives. On some missions, there will be a side objective like retrieving an item or piece of information from the area, which will often put you in favour with the public or give you other items upon completion. As previously stated staying on the public’s good side is important in this game, getting too much heat from the citizens could make traders hesitant to do business with you, so it’s important to try and save civilians in mission scenarios, and to keep any bad guys alive who were forcefully hired from the public.

These extra points to consider during gameplay can affect how you approach missions, and for me is a welcome addition to the game. Once your cops get into the mission, they will usually have to detain or kill enemies, and complete objectives around the map, you will be scored on how well you manage your team, how many arrests you make, and how fast you complete your mission. I would say that most missions will take at least two tries, and a strategy change here and there, the game will not go easy on you and that’s a good thing to me.

The graphics of Rebel Cops stay true to its predecessors, with a cell shaded, low-poly style. The user-interface is also nice and simple, and many actions only appear or are accessible when you are able to use them, preventing too much clutter or confusion. Any more polys might take away from the performance of the game, or confuse the player about what is and is not an interactable object, so for a game like this where you are not up close and observing objects, but rather watching your officers run around from the sky the graphics were a good choice.

The sound design is a little bland, with some voice lines repeating often as characters move about, and with not too many meaningful sound effects. The game doesn’t need in-depth sound design to be good, it works perfectly fine as it is, but adding a little more to the sounds and music the game offers would be a welcome plus.

All in all, Rebel Cops is a blast to play, and feels like a great modification to the This Is The Police formula. My only gripe is that I often like to jump right into things, so I would love the addition of some shorter missions involving smaller maps and fewer police, more along the lines of the game’s tutorial level. Besides that, everything else feels right, the management is fun and challenging, the story is interesting enough, and there are no bugs or glitches that I have run into thus far.