Ah, the good old days of old graphic adventures. Back in 1980’s the adventure games were mostly based on a textual descriptions of the area in which you were at the moment and an option to move north, west, south and east as well as write simple commands such as walk, take, look and such. Yup, those were the days… Those adventures were sometimes so complex and hard that people would give up after computer responded with “unknown command – kill”. Grrrr, some games had such a poor vocabulary that they couldn’t recognize some of the most usual words and this made them not so popular unlike the arcades. Then Sierra came up with its first graphical adventure – King’s Quest, and changed the history of adventures forever. Many other Sierra adventures were made and released soon afterwards and one of them was Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel.
PQ puts you in boots and uniform of a rookie police officer Sonny Bonds in his first day on duty in Lytton Police Department. You will learn how it is to work in a traffic division and see all the bad and good sides of the job (oh, I remember stopping a speeding car with a gorgeous blonde that offered me a deal…). After a few assignments, Sonny will be promoted into a homicide detective and get his first real task: find and capture Death Angel, an extremely dangerous killer. This is where life of a police officer becomes dangerous…
Police Quest is an adventure game but it also features arcade scenes of driving a police car on streets of Lytton. This is actually the hardest part of the game since you can die by crashing into other cars or buildings. The rest of the game is played by cursor keys (for walking around) and typing commands that your character should execute just like in old textual adventures. The difference between those old ones and PQ is a fact that Sierra made quite a vocabulary for the game. Of course, it still doesn’t recognize all the words but it’s much better than any game made before.
The game is quite short and not too hard to complete. I know I was about 13 years old or so and I completed it in less than 2 days. It still doesn’t mean that it’s not good. It sure is, for the time when it was made of course.