A Sluggish Action Adventure

When you think of Beverly Hills Cop, your first instinct is probably to think of Eddie Murphy. The films are his franchise, and if you don’t have his character, Axel Foley, in there then you’d be hard pressed to even consider it a proper entry (we’ll get to that eventually and in more detail when we discuss the unaired TV pilot for a Beverly Hills Cop series). Eddie Murphy’s performance, his comedy chops carrying the film and spicing up what could have otherwise been a pretty generic cop film, are the heart and soul of the series.

That is made perfectly obvious by the first Beverly Hills Cop video game. Because there was no way to fit Eddie Murphy’s performance into a video game for the early 1990s (for PCs without guaranteed sound cards, no CD drives, and no way to fit cut-scenes into the gameplay) the games had to rely on everything around Murphy’s delivery. That’s all the cop action and violence without any of the humor or fun. Beverly Hills Cop, the game, is what you get when you don’t have Eddie Murphy involved: a generic actioner without any enjoyment to be had.

Beverly Hills Cop (the 1990 game, not to be confused with the 2006 game of the same name) is a four-part mini-game collection. By mini, I do mean mini. The game has four play modes, which each take maybe five minutes, max, to complete, and then the game is over. The entire experience lasts no more than 25 minutes, and that’s even with you spending over two minutes on the title screen listening to the game’s rendition of the “Axel F” theme song (which, if you play it on one of the good computers this was released for, such as the Amiga, is actually a pretty killer version of the song). The whole package is decidedly slight.

The first play mode is a side-scrolling shooter. You take Axel and walk along the bottom of the screen, left to right, navigating towers of crates while you shoot at waves of enemies. They also shoot back, while sometimes throwing out rolling land mines or slow-burning sticks of dynamite. The whole experience reminds me of ContraStarted by Konami in 1988 the run-n-gun platform series Contra was, for a time, one of the flagship franchises for the company. except much worse. Axel can only take a single hit before dying, and you have to slowly work your way forward as enemies endlessly spawn. The animation stutters and shakes, and the whole experience feels like a slow, tedious slog. It’s so bad.

Then we move onto a driving stage. In theory (and this is without access to the instruction book so I don’t know the story of the game since the game itself doesn’t give you any story) you’ve just left the warehouse you were in and are not trailing trucks filled with drugs or something. As you drive along the 3D-rendered road, shooting at trucks until you blow up enough of them to end the scenario. Drive off road for too long, though, or get hit by the crates the trucks drop, and you’ll lose a life.

For 1990 I will credit that the driving sequences don’t look bad. They’ve aged horribly, of course, and no one playing now is going to look at these graphics and think they look good. They’re sub-Star Fox level graphics, about in line with what I was used to seeing in PC driving games of the era. It plays about as well as those games, too (which is to say, not well at all). The controls are jerky and you’ll find yourself sliding around a lot when you get any kind of speed. Overall the whole experience was about what I expected from a PC driving game, and that’s not at all a good thing.

This is followed by a top-down shooter, once more in the vein of Contra. Here we have to maneuver our sprite-based hero along a top-down maze through the gardens outside a mansion (presumably this being the base for our drug dealing bad guy and this is where Axel was led after chasing down the trucks and serving up vehicular homicide). You have to navigate Axel through the maze, shooting anyone that gets in your way, until you reach the mansion proper. Along the way you’ll find a machine gun you can use instead of your pistol, and a whole lot of people to shoot in this very basic, tedious shooter. Once again, the game has nothing on Contra.

Finally, inside the mansion, we get a rudimentary first-person, 3D shooter. You have to navigate Axel through the mansion, finding guys to shoot and people to save, all while looking for the Lift that acts as the exit. And, actually, that’s it. The 3D section is very basic, with only one kind of enemy, and everything is done in the flattest of graphics without any style or substance. Worst of all, there’s absolutely no boss fight in this stage, just the 3D maze and the exit. Whoever we were chasing down for this elaborate case doesn’t exist in the game (at least not in the Amiga version I played) leading to a series of challenges that just abruptly end.

I recognize I’ve been harsh on this game and, well, that’s true. It’s a bad game and I can’t help but call it out on that. The fact is that this is a very slight, shooting game collection that very loosely uses the Beverly Hills Cop license to sell itself. It has close to nothing to do with the franchise or the character of Axel Foley (short of having a Black lead hero in the game for two stages) and could have been anything with whatever name attached to it. Calling this a Beverly Hills Cop game feels like they’re greatly stretching things.

But even if we ignore the poorly used license, this is just not a great game. The four different play styles are all crude and rudimentary (a word I have to keep using as it’s also the most accurate descriptor), with none of them having any kind of depth. Could I see any one of these play modes actually being good if they were fleshed out and given more development and depth? Sure. I think if the game could have narrowed in on one or two modes and really focused on those, then they could have been better. Maybe not good, but at least better. More time to tune the graphics, more development of the play mechanics, more variety within the modes. Just… more.

Instead the game gives you one stage in each of the play styles, and none of them are developed enough to be very fun. If there was more platforming and gun variety in the side-scrolling shooter section, that could help. If there was more variety of enemies and weapons in the top down shooting, that would also be good. More enemies, and better developed maze in the first-person shooting section would make the game solid. I’m not sure you could actually save the driving section, as it’s just not fun and very bad, but the other three modes at least could have promise with the right development.

As it stands, none of the sections are great and they’re all over without much fanfare. The whole experience is over in less time than it takes to cook a frozen lasagna. Top to bottom this is just a bad game, and it’s only gotten worse in the years since its release where 3D graphics have improved and game play loops have become richer. This game feels like a set of tech demos for things that could be done on computers in 1990 and not an actual fully developed game. It’s tragic because some of the ideas are interesting even if the whole experience falls flat.

The only reason to pay attention to this game is because of its name. That’s what sold it then and that’s why people go back to it now. If it was just some generic, four-part shooter game it would have come and gone and been ignored. That’s the fate it deserves, no matter what license might have been slapped on the box.