I don’t often get to talk about my interests outside video games on YouTube, which is partly because of my desire to keep different forms of criticism separate from one another. While the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series gives me reason to bring up Japanese cinema, one of my big loves from the international stage is Hong Kong action films. I grew up watching them as a teen, and with the proliferation of new Blu-Ray releases and digital distribution, I’ve been able to expand that knowledge ten-fold over the last decade. I’ve even contributed to some of these newer releases with essays, commentary tracks, and supplemental features.
The reason I bring this up is that the initial pitch for developer targim’s Cop Bastard was that it was inspired by 90s Hong Kong action flicks. If you have any passing interest in films from directors such as John Woo, Tsui Hark, Johnnie To, and Ringo Lam, you’ll easily see how that applies to Cop Bastard. This is visceral stuff echoing the likes of FEAR from Monolith, which itself was a similar mishmash of Hong Kong and Japanese filmic sensibilities.
Where Cop Bastard loses me a little is that the game, itself, is set in early 90s Japan with an emphasis on yakuza violence. That’s decidedly not Hong Kong, and while I do know of some HK films which starred Japanese actors (David Chung’s 1986 masterpiece Royal Warriors has Hiroyuki Sanada starring alongside Michelle Yeoh), the only direct comparison I can make to Cop Bastard is Jackie Chan’s 2009 film Shinjuku Incident. Hong Kong directors rarely set stories in Japan.
What of the gameplay, though? Well, at least in that sense, targim has delivered with a nifty little FPS that strips the genre back to its basics and delivers a concise blast of action. It’s not the most diverse of games, nor does it have much variety, but it’s so tightly directed that you likely won’t get bored before the credits roll.
Cop Bastard
Developer: targim
Publisher: Retrovibe
Release Date: October 29, 2026
MSRP: $12.99
Explaining the plot of Cop Bastard is a little silly because the game is clearly not about that. While Hong Kong action films often had loosely linked events tied together with some narrative framing (a lot of those films would have scripts with the words “FIGHT SCENE HERE” when action was meant to happen), the main event was the action choreography. Fans flocked to cinemas to see the death-defying stunts of Jackie Chan or how Jet Li’s interpretation of Wong Fei-Hung would thwart the Westernization of China.
That’s not to say plot never mattered or wasn’t coherent, but Cop Bastard is clearly going for the look of a Hong Kong film rather than the soul. In that sense, its story follows a crooked cop who gets blackmailed into methodically murdering a gang. As the player, you play this cop and you shoot down hundreds of yakuza across eight levels of corridor crawling mayhem. There’s a fairly standard arsenal of weapons you’ll shoot with, including a pistol with unlimited ammo (John Woo would be proud), a shotgun, an UZI, a double-barreled shotgun, a supremely accurate revolver, and an MP5. As the Steam store page reads, “No puzzles, no perks, no upgrades, and definitely no time wasted on fancy mechanics.”
Having recently finished Doom: The Dark Ages’ DLC and even dipping back into Doom Eternal’s own DLC chapters, I appreciate that simplicity. One thing that has annoyed me with modern shooters, even the retro throwback ones, is that developers feel as if the core gameplay loop isn’t satisfying enough to carry a campaign. OG Doom gave players a limited arsenal with a ton of creative enemies to dispatch across upwards of 32 levels at a time and that was all you needed. Secrets gave you temporary buffs rather than permanent upgrades, and that meant player satisfaction came from uncovering secrets and beating overwhelming odds rather than ensuring your gun did +1 damage.
This could have gone terribly wrong for Cop Bastard, but each level is pretty brief. I had actually completed the game in my first sitting because of how lightning quick the levels are. If targim wanted, it could adapt this into a film flawlessly because the campaign runs between 90 minutes to two hours. It really is a Hong Kong action film, just with some truly bizarre voice acting that makes me squirm a little.
I’m not sure if the intent was to mock poorly dubbed film releases from yesteryear, but Cop Bastard features voice actors doing borderline offensive Japanese impersonations for each character. I can’t say that Hong Kong films never did this with English-speaking individuals, but my first impression was that this game completely misunderstood the assignment. As I went on, I kept trying to nitpick things and the gun play simply won me over.
I won’t say Cop Bastard is as good as Max Payne or FEAR, its two closest gaming analogs, but it does come off like a mash-up of Max Payne and Hotline Miami. Battles are fast, brutal, and demand precision in a manner similar to what Remedy crafted 25 years ago. You won’t be dying a million times before clearing things, but walking into a room mindlessly will get you killed. Shootouts require you position yourself properly and take aim instead of mindlessly spraying and praying.
This is all aided by some gruesome sound design, which captures the impact of gunshots brilliantly. The shotgun sounds beastly, but even the standard pistol feels like the deadliest weapon around thanks to its clean sound effects. When a bullet connects with some unlucky thug’s head, it results in a fountain of blood that would make Tarantino blush, not to mention produces a geyser sound that is cartoonishly wonderful. This is helped by environments spewing particles and debris all over the place when hit by bullets, adding some authenticity to the claim of mimicking Hong Kong action films. This can sometimes be overkill, such as smoke from fire extinguishers lingering in the air and obscuring your vision, but it’s mainly an issue because enemies seem to ignore these fancy effects.
In a way to counter this, Cop Bastard actually does have a rather fancy mechanic, despite what the store page claims. There is an integration of bullet time here, and while I think it mostly sucks, the bar you accumulate for it from killing foes can also be used to regenerate health. It’s not some instant use thing where you miraculously regain lost HP, but a “spite meter” that lets you spit on corpses to restore vitality. With one bar, you’ll gain 10 HP, while two bars give you 25 HP. Spit on boss enemies, and you’ll gain 30, meaning you can actually bank this to strategically heal without stopping to look for med packs. Traditional med packs are still present, but they wind up not mattering in the grand scheme of things.
That small detail, though, actually captures the vibe of something like V-Cinema films. In those movies, the protagonists were usually anti-heroes or even straight up villains, and they tended to spit on their defeated foes as an act of dominance. Cop Bastard nails that perfectly and incorporates it in a way that benefits the gameplay. Never have I been so happy for a shooter to remove regenerating health while not mindlessly defaulting back to med packs.
This isn’t to say the game is flawless. With no jump button or any kind of melee attack, your options for close quarters combat become limited. I suppose your infinite pistol remedies the second complaint, but I did find moments in levels where I could get stuck behind geometry that necessitated a level restart. Sometimes animations would mess up, too, with rag dolls going haywire or your gun not loading in properly. It’s minor stuff that can be ironed out with a patch, at the very least.
The only other aspect I feel the need to bring up is the “Endless Corridor” mode, which is exactly as it sounds. It’s an endless mode where you progress through procedurally generated hallways to see how far you can go. Conversely to the campaign, there is an upgrade system here, but it’s not truly thought out much. Over multiple runs, you will upgrade the power and efficiency of your guns by killing foes with them. You will have to buy ammo, health, and even the firearm you want, but I suppose this gives you a reason to make more than one attempt. I mostly ran it 10 or so times to get the achievement for upgrading everything, but seeing as how the gameplay of Cop Bastard is rather engaging, I never felt like I was wasting time.
Now, I can absolutely criticize Cop Bastard for not really being a Hong Kong action film. Through that lens, this is mainly paying lip service to the industry with a flimsy understanding of what made it so special. In this sense, I would say Cop Bastard definitely could have done a lot more to craft its story around the specific fears Hongkongers or even Japanese citizens had in the 90s (check out Alfred Cheung’s 1988 neo-noir classic On the Run or Seiji Izumi’s 1992 film A Legend of Turmoil for great examples). As a piece of interactive entertainment, though, Cop Bastard succeeds in its goals.
The boomer shooter renaissance is mostly at an end, and the indie scene seems to be moving towards what I’ll call Half-likes now. For targim to spot that, divert to something more like Xbox 360 action games, and create a bare-essentials shooter is strangely what I didn’t know I wanted. I’m not sure the indie scene should rush to copy what Cop Bastard is, but if more developers understood that leaving players wanting more is better than giving players too much, I don’t think we’d have so many people claiming “gaming is dead.” Even if you don’t believe in that hyperbolic statement, Cop Bastard is sure to keep you hooked enough to see its whole campaign through.
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