 class program, S... Some... Destruk… One problem with doing a list video is that it can get outdated very quickly. Take for example the list I made for this channel of the 13 best beat em ups on the super Nintendo. At the time, I had only kinda sorta played undercover cops, a super Famicom game that never left Japan, only enough to develop a passing familiarity with it and I thought it was okay. Then news hit recently that an english patch for it was finished so I figured let's give this one another spin. And yeah, turns out Undercover Cops is easily a top 13 beat-em-up on the Super Nintendo, with or without an English patch. I should point out right away, however, this game is an arcade port originally developed by Irem, and it came over to the Super Famicom three years later by a group called Fairy, and unfortunately the home console edition is single player only. I know a lot of people out there are always on the lookout for co-op beat-em-ups, so keep that in mind. Still, Undercover Cops is a really fun playthrough that reminds me a lot of another Japan only beat-em-up Iron Commando. The major difference between those two games, however, is that Iron Commando is brutally difficult. Undercover Cops is not so bad. There's five levels here, and while the last two are really long and pretty dang tough, it's still a game that most people should be able to finish without feeling like they're banging their heads against a wall. You have three playable characters to choose from. There's Zan, an ex-Karate master, Matt, a former pro football player, and Rosa, who's a vigilante out to avenge her boyfriend who was murdered by the bad guys here. You can start out with up to five lives and five continues, and when you die, you pick up right where you left off. No saves or passwords here either, not that you'll need any, since this is a pretty short playthrough. On the surface, Undercover Cops looks like a Final Fight clone, and to an extent, it kind of is, but the thing is, it does all of those kinds of things really well. The controls are what you'd expect, and each character has a special move that uses up a little bit of life, and also the hit detection is spot-on, the move set is fun, the sound design is well done, and best of all is the sheer amount of weapons you get and the interactivity you get with the settings themselves. For instance, right at the beginning here, you get this friggin' ginormous concrete pillar you can pull out of the ground and swing around, and you watch it crumble apart as you bash enemies. It's so great. It is important to note, however, that the pillar is only going to last depending on who's wielding it. For example, Matt is the strongest character, so he's a friggin' performance artist with the thing. I mean, it might as well be a parade baton, but a weaker character like Rosa, she's not going to be able to use it as long because she can't swing it as well. But Rosa makes up for it in other ways like her quickness and agility and this flying butt move that's the quickest attack in the game. Xan is the balance to the two characters, but you really can't go wrong picking between any of the three. Going back to the weapons, that's really what makes Undercover Cops stand out. You get torches, you can fling at enemies, you can hit people with giant fish, they're steel girders, you can even pick up the barrels themselves, which often contain other weapons you can use, and as someone who's played a gazillion hours worth of 16-bit beat-em-ups, that is a really nice touch. I always wondered why other games never did that. There's other unexpected touches here as well, like when you reach the first level boss, if you time your attacks just right, you can send them into this compactor thing and it's insta-death. That is awesome, although it's definitely not fun if you get trapped there yourself. Still, it's a nice bonus to be able to avoid the monotony of an easy beat-em-up boss fight by adding a risk-reward element to it. Once you've completed a level, you get to this assessment screen which details how many enemies you've taken out and you're rewarded with money which refills your health meter and might even grant you an extra life. So yeah, Undercover Cops is pretty dang fun even if it is only single-player and while it's nice to have an English patch available to follow the story, it's really not necessary to play the game. This game was scheduled to get a North American localization in March 1993 and it was even talked about in Nintendo Power, but it ended up getting canceled for some reason. I should also mention that there is a Game Boy spinoff that also stayed in Japan if you want to check that out as well. Undercover Cops may not add anything, all that new or novel to the beat-em-up genre, but it's one of those beat-em-ups that's made for people who love beat-em-ups and that's good enough for me. And I want to thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.