Remembering G-Police, the best Blade Runner game ever

[Administrator]

As treasured as Blade Runner is among game developers, I've yet to play a cyberpunk game that captures the thrill of the film's initial flight through near-future Los Angeles - Detective Gaff's cruiser spinning upwards past the whirring fungus of satellite arrays, cinder-black apartment blocks and the big blank grins being beamed from video billboards. It's a slick yet self-conscious sequence, the camera jumping around like a player hunting for the right POV: you see the city by turns "directly", as though perched on the bonnet, then from behind Deckard's shoulder, reflected in the windshield and diminished, finally, to a neon wireframe on the dashboard display.
No game about the future of our cities has ever conjured up quite such a bewitching nightmare, but G-Police - a 1997 aerial combat sim set on Jupiter's moon Callisto, about 80 years from now - occasionally comes close, though it lacks the underlying quest for identity that gives the film's imagery so much of its power. In part, that's down to a technological limitation. So hell-bent was developer Psygnosis on bringing the game's domed mining colony setting to life that it took an axe to the draw distance, swaddling entire skyscrapers and flocks of ships in darkness till they're right under your nose.
In a shooter where you'll spend a lot of time hurtling from dome to dome, chasing down gunboats and siege cannons before they can nuke the infrastructure, this sounds like sheer murder, and reviewers of the time were certainly divided. But it also speaks to how day never quite dawns in Blade Runner, a universe of diseased sunsets and distant gas flares where blue skies exist only in memory. Taking its cues as much from noir as cyberpunk, G-Police understands that night is intrinsic to the dystopian industrial city, not cast over it like a shroud but boiling up from its trash and masonry like particles of tar. In any case, it's actually not all that difficult to make sense of the murk, once you get a feel for the area layouts - if buildings vanish from view, engine glare can be discerned from much further afield, a touch that recalls how Psygnosis uses streaks of starfighter exhaust to signpost enemies in G-Police's more optimistic cousin, the wonderful Colony Wars.
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