Undercover Cops (SNES) Playthrough
243A playthrough of Varie's 1995 beat 'em up for the Super Famicom, Undercover Cops.
Played through as Zan on the default difficulty level.
The game was originally slated for a North American release back in the mid-90s, but since that release was canceled, in this video I am playing the officially sanctioned English version that was put out by Retrobit back in 2020.
Irem's Undercover Cops appeared in arcades in the summer of 1992, and it was created by many of the people who would later go on to form Nazca and create the Metal Slug series.
It's the year 2043, the world is a mess, and a villain who looks like Wilford Brimley is preparing to drop a nuke on the city. Flailing in panic, a bunch of bureaucrats have decided to entrust the fate of the city to a group of three "undercover cops," and you choose who you'll play as from this trio.
Zan "Lightning Slasher" Takahara is the all-rounder, Matt "Fire Ball Crusher" Gables is the hulking brute, and Rosa "Blue Gale Revenger" Felmonde is the speedy weakling.
Undercover Cops is a belt-scrolling brawler that borrows liberally from Capcom's Final Fight, and if you have any experience with that game, this one will immediately feel familiar and comfortable. Multi-hit combos, grapples, and life draining special attacks are all present and accounted for, and the controls feel snappy and are reliable in tight situations.
There's a lot of fun variety in the enemy types and the boss designs, just as you'd expect from the team that also brought us Ninja Baseball Bat Man (https://youtu.be/HY7CV8jBqgI), and there are a couple neat level-specific gimmicks, like the crumbling floors in the half-finished building and the swarms of rats in the cave, to keep things interesting. The game's challenge is also pretty reasonably balanced and is far more forgiving than its arcade counterpart, though that's probably more a reflection of the SNES's limitations than anything else.
The presentation is probably the weakest aspect of the game, but it holds up as a good effort on the SNES. The original arcade game was quite a looker for a 1992 release, so you'll see the standard assortment of concessions that you'd expect from this sort of adaptation. Though there's no 2P mode, the number of enemies onscreen at once has been scaled back, the simplified graphics are a bit grainy, and there's a fair bit of slowdown, it still manages to capture the feeling of the original game fairly well in spite of the cutbacks.
If you're a fan of beat 'em ups, I'd recommend giving Undercover Cops a try. It's one of the better games of its type that you'll find on the SNES.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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