From a fanboy’s perspective, the game looks and feels just like the TV series. The police precinct (called The Barn) is an exact copy of that in the show, every room, even some signs are there too as a wink to the fans, not to mention all the characters. The story of the game takes place between seasons three and four (the show had seven seasons total) with Mackey’s team on the brink of termination. The only way to keep the Strike Team roaming the streets of LA is to pull a high-profile bust (an arms race between the Byz-Lat and One-Niners, two of the major gangs that terrorize the district).

Vic Mackey, the main character looks good, maybe not a carbon copy of the actor Michael Chiklis but close enough to be real. The other characters though, with very few exceptions, don’t look too similar to their human counterparts. Some of them actually look like full sized human puppets.

The game will take the player to a good number of LA locations that go from posh mansions, to crack houses, factories and other abandoned places whose surroundings and different elements on the stage look ok by the PS2 standards but lack some polish. The facial animations during cutscenes look odd, especially when the characters’ faces seem to not have eyeballs. Too Rayden-like for a non-sci-fi game. Eerie. Despite the graphics not being top notch, the game tends to slow down at times for no apparent reason. The sound offers the player some of the tunes that can be heard in the series, including some of the actual actors’ voices and a few hard rock / new metal tunes thrown in to accompany the pace of the game in a good way without offering too much either. 

Gameplay wise, our duty is to take Vic Mackey and his Strike Team wherever they are needed. Sometimes colleagues will provide hints of what to do next, some other times you will need to use physical strength to make the bad guys confess by giving them semi-eternal beatings. When I say semi-eternal, I really mean it. Some thugs have a life bar that cannot be depleted, no matter how many times you hit them. While at the scene you will need to find evidence, drugs, bullets, money, weapons, etc. The curious thing here is that you can find the evidence only by playing a mini-game, which is something fun for the first two times you try it, but by the third try it becomes a perfect mixture between dull and annoying. This mini game consists in moving the analog stick over a police badge, while paying attention to a circle that either gets bigger or smaller depending on how far you are from the object you are attempting to discover. If you win the mini game you get the item, fail and the evidence will be forever lost, and that’s something that will happen a lot, believe me.