I'm thoroughly aware that I'm in the minority here, but I find Hotline Miami's delirious neon-drenched hyper-violence kinda off-putting. I could do without hearing the squish and crunch and splatter of blood and bone.
This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK.
LA Cops does a similar thing - it's a top-down shooter where you infiltrate buildings and clear them of bad guys, perhaps destroying some servers or documents whilst you're there - but it's couched in a colourful, 70s cop-show aesthetic that, to me at least, makes the cartoon violence rather more palatable.
In LA Cops you're always working with a partner, switching between the two archetypal cop-fiction characters that you select before heading out on a mission. As long as your partner has ammo, they can cover their immediate vicinity, so if a bad guy comes bursting through a door they'll automatically take shots and bring them down.
It means that LA Cops has a strong tactical element as well as reaction-based shooting - leaving your partner to stand guard at strategic junctures can thin out the goon population, but if they run out of ammo or are approached from an unexpected angle whilst you're in another room, you've left them exposed.
Let one cop die, and the game gets a lot more difficult with just one left - then it really is all about shooting anything that moves. Turns out there's a reason that cops run in pairs. Every cop will have their own individual story, told in flashy-looking 3D cutscenes; not all of them are good guys, it turns out, surprising nobody who has ever watched a cop drama.
LA Cops is on Steam Early Access for $11.99 right now, with one multi-stage level ready to go - the full version will be ready later this year, and will have eight levels and plenty more features than the build I played. I think it's promising, and worth an early punt if you're into the kind of cop-fiction and cop-action that it captures so well.
This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK, bringing you original reporting, game culture and humour with a U from the British isles. Follow them on @Kotaku_UK.