Rebel Cops is a perfect example of a "great idea, terrible execution" game. I would love to like it more, but it makes it very hard. The gameplay, both mechanically and interactionally, becomes repetitive and uninteresting. The plot is the most hamfisted "what if good cops had to be bad" movie plot you can think of. And, most importantly, the game is unfortunately neither hard nor engaging.

I'm aware there are many reviews complaining that the game's third mission is overly hard and punishing: I found it mostly time-consuming and uninteresting, since as long as you play the game in stealth (which is clearly what the creators were thinking of: the game reminds me of a bad Commandos reboot in that sense), it's just slow, not hard.

All that said, I played through the whole campaign as a side-activity: the game requires mostly patience, so it works well as a thing you do when you've got dead time on your hands.


The limited saves system is a lovely idea on paper, but in a game that practically forces you to reroll certain interactions until you get the result you like, it's mostly a test of your ability to deal with monotony: how many turns are you willing to play again? (As a side note, I never ran out of saves in any of the missions, ending some of the larger maps with up to 10 in the pocket, so the mechanic is also not actually punishing, just creating more repetition.)

If you play stealth, loot, and do the side objectives, you will never run out of money: the whole tagline of being low on resources rings a bit hollow when I had all of my guys decked out from mission 4. And boy, does the game want you to play stealth.

Everything is built around stealth being easier, and there's even an ability you get for all your cops to remote stealth capture, making you an invisible, unstoppable force of officers yelling "get the ♥♥♥♥ down" and criminals disappearing in puffs of smoke like so many demons returning to hell: right in sights of their buddies, who go "eh, Mikey went for a puff I guess" before getting yelled at next turn.

The extra actions mechanic is nice, but unnecessary: you almost never have to use it, outside of "I'll buy extra actions because I don't want to reload into 5 turns ago."

The character progression is uninteresting, and levels rack up so fast it's also practically unnecessary. You carry a lad through one or two missions, and they're part of the yellers' squad with delay actions, which trivialises both the progression and the gameplay.

You're incentivised to bring (carriable) loot out of the maps by... nothing, outside of completionism grit, I guess? Some give exp, but as pointed out above, you don't really need it. It's just turns spent trecking a TV through the empty map. (As a funny aside, you can technically make your cops faster by stacking full strength and carrying ♥♥♥♥ around. Lifting and dropping items costs nothing outside of your time, and with max strength the characters move more with an item than without.)

At the end of the day, can't recommend, not even for fans of the action economy turn based genre. Unengaging gameplay, uninteresting plot, unchallenging mechanics. Spend your time elsewhere.

Game play is good.. Story is meh... Also why diverge mission paths but forced to turn viktor over? As soon as I saw someone investigating warren nash from extra jobs. I knew I can't trust jackie boy wholeheartedly after seeing what he became on titp2.