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The level design for the platforming is probably the best I could imagine anyone pulling off in a 2.5D game like this. Platforming in a first-person shooter is difficult to get right, and Fashion Police Squad unfortunately falls short, but it’s in good company. One thing you will notice is an increased emphasis on platforming. It’s all very linear, so when it pretends to be an open-ended key-hunt kind of shooter, it feels a little like a cruel tease, but that doesn’t make the level design bad. Some sections become repetitive and overstay their welcome a bit, but something different is never too far off. The level design throughout the game is fairly decent. You feel like someone who was pestering you finally left the room. You don’t feel a sense of achievement at overcoming something difficult. When the game intends to be at its most challenging, it is at its most irritating.

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Ultimately this results in either a lot of ducking for cover while you prepare for your next priority target, or just a lot of trial and error. Perhaps there is a flow state that you can reach where this becomes fun, but I don’t think the actual swap mechanics are fluid enough for that to be the case. But when so many of your shots are being absorbed in the clutter, it’s not a fun mechanic, it’s annoying. Clearly, in these hectic arenas, the designers want you to weapon swap constantly. The problem comes when you have too many different kinds of enemies stacked together. Of course you can’t fix loud attire with a blast of color. In fact, given the premise of the game, it works for a little while. However, this isn’t immediately an issue in Fashion Police Squad. Yes, you should have weapons that are more efficient at dealing with certain enemies than others, but having enemies that are immune to all but one weapon is generally considered a big no-no.

This is usually a cardinal sin in the FPS genre. In particular, we have enemy-specific weaponry (though there are some minor exceptions that don’t do much to alleviate this issue). However, weapons and enemies are more tightly linked than usual here. The special sauce is always in how they are combined, but they are their own design elements. Generally I would evaluate all of these things separately. Here I like to focus on four main aspects: weapons, enemies, movement, and level design. Combat isn’t the only element to a shooter like this, but it is undoubtedly the most important. I’ve played enough of the more recent throwback FPS games to understand that the “retro” concept means different things to different people, but the common focus is on the gameplay. Make no mistake, Fashion Police Squad wants you to laugh, but its design is gameplay first. It isn’t a long game, so it doesn’t really overstay its welcome in that regard. It doesn’t all work, but there’s enough there to keep your eyes out of the back of your head. Digging into the joke and building a world around it produces some solid comedy throughout the game. Isn’t the joke of fashion police as actual police a bit tired? It is, but that doesn’t mean there’s no mileage left on it. I know what you’re thinking, and I thought it too. It’s a first person shooter where you don’t actually kill anyone. In Fashion Police Squad, you play as Sergeant Des on a mission to solve the rampant fashion crimes in Trendopolis. Fashion Police Squad feels much more akin to a Duke Nukem 3D or Shadow Warrior, though somehow goofier. This has taken on several forms, from Quake clones, to expansive games built on top of the original Doom engine. What these all share in common is a desire to get back to the fast-paced, gameplay centric design of 90s first-person shooters.

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If you aren’t aware, the glut of throwback action shooters has become a growing niche in the PC gaming community (with some titles creeping onto consoles as well). With Fashion Police Squad, Mopeful Games has created one of the strangest titles to come out of the retro-FPS boom of the last few years. Allen Christian reviews Fashion Police Squad…

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