Chicken Police - Paint it RED!

Ok ok listen, Zootopia but drugs, alcoholism, prostitution, murder, crime, and make it a noir detective game. Also make it have incredibly good voice acting, a good story, and make the subtitles have some hiccups every now and then.

If you are a fan of visual novels and have a soft spot for aging detectives, then I would definitely recommend the Chicken Police. It is well written with black/white visuals and a sound track that are true to the film noir style. The story is engaging and plays out in great detail with a wide variety of animal characters in classic roles (the sidekick, the sexy damsel in distress, the mob boss, the madam, the police chief, etc.). I classify it as a 'visual novel' because 95% of your time will be spent clicking through dialog and clicking on hot spots to find out more about them. You point and click on a map to travel between locations and you continue clicking and listening for almost all of the 8+ hours it may take you to get through this title. I love detective games and favor a balance between participation and observation (for example - the Darkside Detective, The Silk Rose Murders, the Tex Murphy games). For me, the sheer volume of dialog in the Chicken Police grew tiresome and I found myself speed reading and clicking rather than listening. There are about a half dozen 'active' moments and some cut scenes to watch. But, overall, it is a very passive game. As an achievement junkie, I clicked everything multiple times, spoke to every character again and again, and visited every location multiple times but still missed items. Since there is no 'chapter' revisit, the only way to collect the missing achievements is to repeat the whole game and hope for the best. This is not something that I am inclined to do. The game autosaves so there is no chance to backtrack to a prior scene and some locations disappear once the story moves forward. I realize that this is the approach in many current games but I still don't like it. I became a bit frustrated with the lack of control instructions on the investigation and activity screens. When presented with these, you have to figure out what is required. I wasn't looking for solutions... just instructions on how to fire/reload a gun or what you were supposed to do on the investigation summaries. There is a 'hint' on these screens which gives a clever comment but no true assistance. For the most part, the story moves at it's own pace and locations become available as the plot progresses. However, on multiple occasions, I found myself stuck because I had not clicked items in a particular sequence or initiated an additional conversation required to activate the map. This resulted in time spent clicking and clicking, trying to figure out what was expected (after I thought I had exhausted all options). At such moments, the Steam discussion forum was most helpful as other players had found the same sticking points. To summarize, I'm glad I played and I enjoyed the story. Kudos to the development team for a job well done and making this title work with chickens, dogs, rats, cats, etc. If you are a gamer like me who prefers to keep moving during an adventure (rather than sitting still), you may want to consider your own tolerance for visual novels prior to investing in this title.

I expected nothing more than a funny satire and couldn't have been more wrong. The game is a full-fledged detective noir game, with really cool and charismatic characters, stunning black-and-white environments, with rare bits of color that pop up very nicely, reminiscing of Sin City. Great fully-voiced dialogues, superb soundtrack, and a detailed, around 8-10 hours long, very immersive story. Achievement completion is a little tedious but nothing too bad if you're willing to do it. All in all, this was a cluckin' awesome detective-noir game well above my expectations and I'd recommend it to any fan of the genre.