The Story of Failure: Beat Cop from 11 bit studios
Polish company 11 bit studios, which created This War of Mine and Frostpunk, admitted that the game released to her Beat Cop was unsuccessful. The game parodies series about cops, but critics did not appreciate the monotonous gameplay, rude jokes and police violence.
In recent years, 11 bit studios has been striving to produce not only its own, but also other people’s developments. Beat Cop is their second publishing project after the unnoticed Spacecom space strategy. The authors of Beat Cop are a young Polish Pixel Crow team. The game was released on desktops in March 2017.
The developers were inspired by a TV show about cool cops of the 80s, such as “Miami Police”. In an effort to convey the spirit of the genre, developers filled the game with racist and sexist statements and stereotypes, and also pushed players to break the law uncontrollably.
So, the game was positioned as satire and banter. Similar projects have appeared on the market before – take, for example, the Hotline Miami pixel violence festival or the more meditative This Is the Police. But Beat Cop failed to repeat their success.
Critics met the game poorly. The senior editor of Rock Paper Shotgun, John Walker, smashed it to smithereens, criticizing both the Beat Cop style and design: the gameplay is monotonous and dull, the player has no space to make decisions, and a disgusting timer has been added to the game, because of which the tasks received at the end of the game day immediately fail.
The game humor was supposed to embellish the merciless gameplay, but it turned out to be one-sided and annoying – there is a limit after which jokes about “black” and “yellow” cease to seem bold and simply begin to annoy. One of the Polish critics described the game humor as “so rude that it becomes embarrassing.”
Reviews in some other Polish and Czech publications were more positive, but this did not change the overall picture, although it corrected the rating on Metacritic to a relatively decent 71.
Why did 11 bit studios release the game exactly like this? This was stated in an interview with GameIndustry by the head of the marketing department of the company, Patrick Grzeszczuk.
According to him, neither the developers nor the publishers were going to make the game offensive or turn it into a statement that the US has a rotten police system.
“When some elements of the game did not convince us, we discussed them with developers. Every time we had any doubts, we asked them to explain what their choice is based on and what purpose it pursues. If they explained why this element was in the game, we gave the green light because we didn’t want to limit them in any way… This is our strategy as a publishing house, and we stuck to it,” says Patrick.
Both the developers from Pixel Crow and the 11 bit studios team themselves remember with warmth and nostalgia the old Western series about the police, because they watched them as a child.
“It was just an attempt to recreate the spirit of the times and this particular part of pop culture,” emphasizes Grzezhchuk.
Looking back, he admits that Beat Cop was “far from ideal, although some things in the game were very good.” The team wanted to pay tribute to their favorite shows, but Beat Cop turned out to be disconnected from the culture and the theme that the developers were trying to reflect in it.
“Of course, as far as the tone of the game is concerned, I would now definitely recommend finding a different approach… We have become smarter now. I think the first thing to do was to find someone who understands this particular topic and culture well… We will approach these issues more consciously and carefully. We understand where we made a mistake, and now we know how to act,” Patrick assured.
However, finally, we must pay tribute to the game – it managed to find its audience and get 84% positive reviews on Steam. The authors of positive reviews write that they liked the humor, the gameplay seemed unobtrusive, and the theme caused a sense of nostalgia – and wasn’t this what the developers ultimately sought?
Also on the topic:
