Giant Cop is an open world videogame, in a sense. It’s got a large urban area named Micro City, littered with people going about their days, buildings to explore, and vehicles to interact with. For any normal character, there’d be a lot to cover here. As the name suggests, though, you’re not any normal character. As an enormous police officer that towers above the skyline, you can cover the entire area in just a few steps. The world itself isn’t so open, then, but this still keeps the playful nature of a sandbox environment and player freedom, making Giant Cop one of the HTC Vive’s most amusing and even promising upcoming titles.
In Other Ocean Interactive’s VR debut, you’ll be tasked with keeping Micro City safe from a number of lawbreakers. You might be on the hunt for drunk citizens stumbling down a street, or nudists darting along the pavement in their birthday suits. When you do locate these deviants, you’ll use the HTC Vive’s positional tracking to lean down into the environment, pick them up with a hand controller, and then indifferently toss them into a police station with a conveniently-placed funnel fitted to the top.
Needless to say, it doesn’t take long to venture beyond this objective. Though only an early demo, Micro City already sports a handful of distractions that will see you break a few laws yourself. A tennis shop, for example, holds a novelty-sized racket that can be picked up and then used to bat citizens off into a distant ocean, or placed on a train track for the particularly twisted. A helicopter hovers around your head, ripe for the taking and smashing, though Grand Theft Auto fans should take note that you can’t lower the blades into criminals. Though the potential for hyper violence is there, Giant Cop isn’t that sort of videogame, and probably for good reason. It doesn’t fit the tone.
That doesn’t mean you won’t get to destroy things playing by the book, though. A daring bank heist can be thwarted by grabbing the robber’s getaway vehicle, a flying car, and lobbing it into the police station. Hopefully Other Ocean Interactive is able to come up with other says to let players off the leash and still be a little more explosive.
In fact, much of what could be great about Giant Cop is yet to actually be developed. Other Ocean Interactive has acknowledged that walking around the city itself with a pair of hands but no consequences for stepping into a building is a strange sensation, and hopes to address this. It’s also looking at possible systems to change the experience based on how much destruction you cause and how you interact with citizens. Treat the city well, for example, and people will cheer you on as you lean down. Rule with an iron fist, however, and they may well flee at the sight of you.
Giant Cop is one of the more hilarious interpretations of the HTC Vive’s Room Scale tracking yet seen. That only gets Other Ocean Interactive so far, of course, and the developer will have to pull out all the stops to transform this into an engaging multi-hour experience. In truth though, if even this demo were to release for a small fee, there’s enough fun in this small package to make it worthwhile. Surprisingly, Giant Cop still has space to grow, but what’s on offer right now makes great use of Room Scale tracking.
