It was imagined to be a straightforward job. Get in, set the detonators, get out, receives a commission. However now, with seemingly each fed within the state on my tail, it’s clear that Cop Land, certainly one of GTA Vice City’s mid-game missions, is something however a straightforward job.
You very probably don’t like Cop Land. In actual fact, you might hate it. It’s fiddly, simply failed, and messing up will ship you proper again to the beginning of its four-objective gauntlet. It requires wrangling the police’s uncooperative AI routines and infiltrating enemy territory, all whereas babysitting your associate in crime, Lance Vance. Oh, and also you additionally must survive a five-star wished degree chase via the town. It’s just like the escort quest from hell… and it’s type of good.
To know why one thing so irritating can nonetheless be genuinely improbable, we first have to rewind the clock. When Vice Metropolis arrived in late 2002, it made the sooner video games – even the genre-defining GTA 3 that had launched simply a yr prior – appear to be primitive toys. It achieved its lofty ambition via a number of avenues: a larger, extra fascinating metropolis; a wider number of automobiles; a property administration system; a better-written story; and, after all, a completely impeccable ‘80s vibe.
Arguably extra fascinating, if much less even in its execution, was Vice City’s ambition to ship extra complicated mission design than its predecessors. Till this level, GTA sometimes despatched you out to realize a single violent goal earlier than flashing up the Mission Full card and showering you with cash. Vice Metropolis does admittedly have loads of these, particularly throughout its opening act, however as Tommy Vercetti’s journey takes him into the large leagues, the missions ask an increasing number of of you, to various levels of success. The most effective examples of this ambition is Cop Land, which takes you on a journey of quickly escalating stakes throughout the town’s Vice Level neighborhood.
Cop Land is the ultimate mission within the Vercetti Property arc. Tommy has simply had infamous gangster Ricardo Diaz rubbed out of existence, and now he runs essentially the most highly effective legal enterprise within the metropolis. However issues are removed from rosy: with Diaz gone, lots of the crime lord’s former enterprise associates are refusing to pay safety cash to the brand new man in cost. Tommy units out to intimidate his “purchasers” over a couple of missions, killing different gang members making an attempt to muscle in on his turf, in addition to shattering the storefronts of the companies that refuse to pay for defense. It’s a chain of missions with thematic consistency and escalating stakes – one thing Vice City’s older siblings can’t actually boast about.
Sadly, a few damaged home windows received’t intimidate the proprietor of a espresso store within the North Level Mall, so certainly one of Tommy’s guys units up a bomb to torch the place. However the wiring is cooked, and the mall is now locked down by the bomb squad. To destroy the proof and save their new empire from crumbling earlier than it’s even begun, Tommy and Lance don’t have any different possibility than sneaking into cop land and detonating the bomb themselves.
To say the mall is “crawling with cops” is a little bit of an understatement. The whole top-half of the Vice Level district turns into overrun with them, changing all pedestrians and visitors with hordes of beat cops and features of police cruisers. It’s a formidable use of asset switching to create a tense surroundings; the entire north tip of the island is now an impregnable fortress manned by doughnut munchers.
To get contained in the mall, Tommy and Lance are going to must disguise themselves as cops. That is the mission’s first goal, however in a formidable show of how devoted Rockstar was to creating Vice Metropolis really feel like an genuine place the place you possibly can do no matter you wished, you may utterly ignore what you’re imagined to do and waltz into the mall sporting your Hawaiian shirt. You’ll face a wall of armed cops given full authority to open fireplace because of the five-star wished degree you set off by trespassing the crime scene, so that is tantamount to suicide, however the truth that you may try it makes Vice Metropolis really feel genuinely freeform and impressively reactive.
To see the mission via correctly, you’ll want to accumulate a couple of police uniforms, a course of that calls for you lure two officers into a storage so as to beat them up and steal their garments. Fortunately, the mall’s lockdown means there are extra cops than you’ll ever want actually down the highway out of your lock-up. Frustratingly, truly getting them to surrender their garments is as enjoyable as rubbing pepper spray in your eyes.
Because you want two uniforms, you want two cops to comply with you into the storage. Which means incurring greater than a single wished star, as minor crimes sometimes solely ship one officer after you. However inflicting a little extra mayhem will dispatch a number of police automobiles to your location, which nearly all the time screech to a halt proper in entrance of the lock-up, stopping the storage door from shutting. If the door can’t drop, the cutscene that nets you the uniforms received’t set off. Your solely possibility is to endure the chaos as you reverse automobiles out of the driveway and encourage cops to comply with you into the storage relatively than take potshots at you from the opposite aspect of the road. You’re utterly on the mercy of the police’s AI routines, making for a problem that feels virtually random – you possibly can easily swipe the uniforms on the primary try, or find yourself in a irritating cycle of deaths and arrests.
Along with your disguises secured, you may transfer on to the following goal and method the bomb. As long as you don’t do something silly, you may calmly stroll via the mall to the espresso store and step into the highlighted zone to repair the explosives. After that, it ought to simply be a case of driving away from the scene.
If solely it have been that simple.
In one more instance of your crew’s questionable expertise for crime, the bomb is on a five-second fuse. Tommy and Lance are barely away from the blast radius earlier than the cafe is blown to smithereens (a detonation that completely scars the map, a Rockstar trick that started in GTA 3). Very clearly the perpetrators of this very critical crime, the pair should now escape each cop in cop land, who’ve all all of a sudden develop into very trigger-happy because of the five-star wished degree you’ve earned for dabbling in actions adjoining to home terrorism.
5 stars is Vice City’s second-highest wished degree. It turns the police virtually feral, utterly disregarding any sense of highway accountability or private security of their pursuit of you. They use their automobiles not a lot as battering rams, however as V6-powered homing missiles. As long as justice is served, they actually don’t care about the price.
Nevertheless it’s not simply the police who now stand in your manner: SWAT groups are deployed throughout the town, arriving in armoured vans and rappelling from helicopters. The FBI additionally give chase of their armoured SUVs, their males armed with computerized weaponry. Getting out alive ain’t gonna be simple, so that you’ve obtained to consider the escape earlier than you even set one foot within the constructing.
The place you park your automobile earlier than coming into the mall is surprisingly very important to your success. The plain place is on the mall’s principal streetside door, however the espresso store is on the alternative aspect of the purchasing centre, so when the shit hits the fan, you’ll must struggle via a legion of armed officers to achieve your getaway wheels. That’s why the smart move is to park within the aspect alley that runs alongside the south aspect of the mall – you may truly go away your automobile proper outdoors the exit that’s closest to the espresso store. Submit-detonation, you’ll be barely 10 yards away out of your ticket out of right here.
There’s one other good purpose to park by the south entrance. The alley comprises arguably essentially the most helpful pick-up for this state of affairs: the Bribe, which lowers your wished degree by one star. That’ll take you right down to 4 stars, eradicating the FBI from the hunt. It’s a canny placement from Rockstar, permitting anybody who spends a couple of minutes scoping out the joint to realize an virtually quick benefit within the mission’s closing goal of escaping again to the Vercetti Property.
However there’s nonetheless work to do: it’s essential to survive the automobile chase residence. Effectively, I say you – anybody who has a respectable deal with on Vice City’s driving will probably have little difficulty making it to Starfish Island, particularly contemplating essentially the most direct route again to the Vercetti Property passes by a second Bribe, hidden the place the highway forks close to the Vice Level Penthouse. However neither the route nor wished degree is the true difficulty right here; your Achilles heel is Lance, who’s successfully a useless man’s change for the mission failed display screen.
If Lance snuffs it, it’s throughout – go immediately again to your final save, don’t go Go, don’t gather the police uniforms that already took you 5 makes an attempt to steal. And Lance is de facto, actually good at dying. You’re combating in opposition to the tinderbox that’s two PS2-era AI techniques grinding in opposition to one another – Lance’s primitive pathfinding means he can solely barely comply with you, and the “cease in any respect prices” aggression of the police means he’s continually pulled into firefights he has no hope of successful. Your solely possibility is to get him into a automobile as quickly as doable and pray to god that the cops don’t shunt you off the highway; if you happen to ever want to change automobiles, Lance is a assured goner, both from the explosion of your wreck or the relentless gunfire that hails down as you hijack new wheels.
Guarantee Lance survives the ultimate chase and also you’ll be rewarded with $10,000 and – extra importantly – a common earnings. You’ve efficiently arrange a safety ring, and cash will step by step trickle in out of your many consumers for the rest of the marketing campaign. However the true reward is the satisfaction of finishing one of many recreation’s most formidable, flawed missions.
Vice Metropolis noticed Rockstar’s first experiments in extremely scripted, multi-stage missions. Right now, these are the norm – it’s unattainable to think about GTA 5 and Purple Lifeless Redemption 2 with out their cinematic heists and dramatically escalating occasions. However the origins of those missions was a messy affair, as Rockstar suffered via the ache of constructing them work in a metropolis sandbox that had beforehand been the stage for quests sometimes no extra difficult than “drive to level X to kill particular person Y”. Cop Land is a type of awkward missions – it’s unattainable to name it a triumph contemplating the fiddly nature of securing these uniforms and escorting Lance out of the new zone.
However whereas some think about it one of many worst GTA missions ever, Cop Land typically finds itself on lists of Vice City’s finest moments, and it’s not exhausting to see why. Fooling the police with stolen uniforms is a singular excessive, and the against-all-odds escape is a automobile chase for the historical past books. It’s additionally a mission that embraces the various prospects of an open world – you may utterly bypass the automobile chase finale by parking a helicopter subsequent to the mall and taking to the skies the second issues warmth up. Cop Land is a good instance of Vice Metropolis at its most formidable, and a reminder of why Rockstar’s groundbreaking PS2 period was so vital for the complete medium.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Govt Editor of Options.