Video Game / Mega City Force

aka: Mega City Police

"Hello, Agent. Mega City needs your services. Are you ready to uphold the law?"

Mega City Force, formerly known as Mega City Police, is a challenging 2D shooter Pixel Art action Roguelike by Undreamed Games which released on Steam on July 28th, 2023.

You play as one of multiple different agents of the Mega City Force^note Also known as the Mega City Task Force or M.C.T.F., a special peacekeeping task force designed to bring crime and corruption to its knees. The streets of Mega City are choked with criminals and lawlessness, and it's your job to introduce them to the law using as much violence as humanly possible. Sporting a Hotline Miami-esque neofuturistic aesthetic, Mega City Force is a procedurally generated mishmash of Robocop and Judge Dredd. Gameplay consists of clearing room after room of heavily armed criminals with whatever weapons you can find in chests scattered around the city. Between each level you'll be able to use the money the criminals drop to purchase upgrades and contracts with which you can earn even more money. At the end of each stage is a dangerous boss surrounded by goons, making every level's final encounter an all-out brawl for survival.

The game also has several post-launch updates planned, each of which is expected to add a new character and new level to the game. The first, the Outlaw/Prison update, released on August 24th, 2023. The second, the Robot/Factory update, released on December 21st, 2023. The third, the Janitor/Tunnels update, released on March 22nd, 2024.

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Mega City Force contains examples of:

• A.K.A.-47:
  • The iconic drum-mag Thompson submachine gun is called a "Gangster SMG".
  • The AK47 itself is merely called an "Assault Rifle".
  • Rookie's unlockable starter weapon looks suspiciously like an M16, but is called a "Battle Rifle".
• And the Adventure Continues: Beating the game leaves you with this message:
  The future unchanged
  The corruption will be back
  The work never ends...
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Beating the game on Normal, Hard and Extreme difficulty on Classic mode with each character grants three unlockable skins per character. The Extreme Difficulty ones are pretty much Bragging Rights Rewards, as by that point you'll have done everything you need for that character and won't need to play them again.
• Anti-Frustration Features: There is a separate mode that allows you to restart from the beginning of a level rather than all the way back at the start of the game, although you can't unlock any skins from beating the game with it enabled.
• A Winner Is You: Beating the Mech and by extension the game causes the camera to pan to the sun rising over Mega City, the credits to roll, a quick stinger to play showing your character's successful mission report and that there is still work to do, and then you're unceremoniously booted back to the MCF base.
• Blatant Lies: The "Suburbs" location is everything but a suburb, and is clearly still very much downtown with fences, taxis and apartment blocks. Of course, this is a Mega City, so it might actually be the closest thing the city has to an actual suburb.
• Bonus Dungeon: The Factory, Prison and Tunnels are off from the main path of levels, and primarily serve as a way for you to acquire some more money and upgrades before assaulting the MegaCorp if you feel underpowered for that point in the game, as well as acquiring more rerolls for the Shop.
• Bottomless Magazines: You will never have to reload in this game, instead drawing directly from your chosen weapon's ammo pool. Strangely, some weapons like revolvers clearly do have a split-second reload animation, but this doesn't prevent you from firing the weapon and is purely for immersion purposes.
• Bowdlerize: With the rename of the game to Mega City Force, any and all references to the playable Agents in the game being cops and the MCPD being a police force were removed. This includes removing the MCPD lettering on the side of MCF headquarters and reskinning the MCF cruisers in the garage from being obvious squad cars into generic black vehicles.
• Captain Ersatz:
  • Cyborg is a very obvious one of RoboCop. He has a chrome-plated exterior and a visor helmet and he was turned into a Full-Conversion Cyborg but still has his memories. Even his starting gun looks and functions almost identically to Murphy's iconic burst-fire pistol. The skin you unlock for beating the game on Extreme difficulty with him, "Robohero", removes any plausible deniability since it gives him RoboCop's color scheme and exposed mouth and chin.
  • King, the gang boss of the Prison, is one of the Duke of New York, being a large, sunglasses-clad Scary Black Man who rules over a prison as a monarch.
  • Beta, the boss of the Factory, is one of Cain/RoboCop 2.0, being a huge robot decked out with weaponry whose face is a TV monitor which folds into a compartment on its head, and is stated to have a human inside powering it.
• Chainsaw-Grip BFG: Quite a few of the guns you can wield throughout the game are this, typically Epic or Legendary guns like the Belt Machine Gun, Proton Beam Gun and Cyclic Fusion Gun.
• Cyberpunk: Given its direct inspirations, it's only natural that the game would be this. Plenty of the criminals you face in this Urban Hellscape of a city have cybernetic augments, and a few members of the MCF possess them as well. Numerous cybernetic upgrades are also available for purchase at the shop in between stages, such as bionic legs which increase your speed.
• Custom Uniform: There doesn't appear to be a standard MCF uniform, as every current member of the Mega City Force is shown wearing different clothing. Body armor doesn't even seem to be a requirement, as is the case with Detective, Captain and Outlaw.
• Deliberate VHS Quality: Not only does the game have this(to the point where certain words are hard to read), but it also has warping as if it were playing on a curved screen from the '80s or '90s.
• Die, Chair, Die!: You can shoot up trash cans, crates, parking meters, parked Flying Cars, and virtually everything else on the streets of Mega City. Shooting crates sometimes makes them drop weapons.
• Disk One Nuke: Most of the unlockable starting weapons are direct upgrades from the normal ones, and some are good enough that they can even carry a run by themselves. The 1.04 patch reclassified the unlockable weapons to give them item rarities, and a lot of them are Rare and at least one (Outlaw's spiked bat) is Legendary.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Many of the contracts you can buy in between levels offer huge payouts that can net you several upgrades, but they usually require completing the next level under a very difficult stipulation(a No-Damage Run, having 95% accuracy, etc.)
• Dirty Cop: Defied. Captain realized that the MCTF was rotten to the core and serving the MegaCorp, so he traveled back in time to assemble a team of uncorruptible agents and purge the MCTF of the MegaCorp's influence.
• Dual Boss: The brothers Bucket and Spade are the gang bosses of the Ruins, and you must fight them simultaneously. Bucket carries a massive bazooka while Spade has a huge minigun.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Robot is the only unlockable character who doesn't appear in MCTF HQ after clearing a level, instead always appearing behind the HQ's administrative desk until you unlock it.
• Enhanced Archaic Weapon: Some types of slug-throwers are enhanced crossbows, such as the Repeating Crossbow and the Explosive Crossbow. Hunters in the ruins also employ such upgraded crossbows which fire in a spread formation like a shotgun.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: You or an enemy shooting a car a couple of times will cause it to explode, dealing a lot of explosive damage. Explosive chain reactions from missiles or exploding enemies can set them off as well.
• Excuse Plot: You are a Mega City Force Agent! Criminals rule the streets! Go shoot them! That's about all the story the game has.
• Flying Car: All the cars in Mega City appear to be these, including your trusty squad car that you leave the MCTF headquarters with.
• Gainax Ending: It is not super clear why destroying a random mech at the top of the MegaCorp purges the MCTF of corruption, especially since the pilot seems to be another goon in a suit and not any kind of high-ranking executive.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Before the 1.04 Patch, there was a regression issue with the Speedster and Overachiever Contracts which meant the timer on them would never activate and thus the contracts would always fail, rendering them wastes of money in the shop. Luckily, as mentioned it has since been fixed, allowing them to be actually useful and worth purchasing.
• Gang of Hats: Each stage features one of these:
  • The Suburbs has Visor's gang, who all dress like punks and most of whom wear visors.
  • The Construction Site has enemies all themed after construction workers, with co-opted portable automated nailguns and buzzsaws for good measure.
  • The Ruins' enemies all look like Badass Biker Mad Max rejects, up to and including their bosses Bucket and Spade.
  • The Prison's gang all wear at least one part of their orange prison jumpsuits, even if they're otherwise shirtless.
  • The Factory features hazmat suit wearing goons and lots of robotic enemies.
  • The Tunnels are the lair of a society of disheveled Mutants who all sport weirdly-colored skin and horrific deformities.
  • Japantown's enemies are all Cyberpunk Yakuza goons.
  • The MegaCorp has its own security force, who all either wear heavily armored riot gear or business suits.
• Gatling Good: The Minigun, Gatling Blaster, Turbo Laser and Rotary Plasma Cannon are all extremely powerful gatling guns which use different ammo. Their only weakness is that they need to be revved up, so you can't use them for quick reactions and they will stop firing if you use an ability, similar to an electro gun.
• Generic Graffiti: The walls of Mega City's suburbs are covered in phrases like "DIRTY COPS" and "FUCK THE COPS", but there are also nonsense phrases like "LOST HOPE" and "FAKE LIFE".
• Genre Throwback: To '80s-styled Cyberpunk, especially Robocop and Time Cop.
• Gratuitous Japanese: To fit with the whole vaporwave VHS aesthetic, the title is spelled out in Katakana^note transliterated as "Megā shitī forsu" as well as English on the main menu.
• Great Escape: One of the possible Random Events is "SURVIVE THE BREAKOUT!", in which a huge gang of enemies from the Prison who have managed to escape. It becomes your job to send them back to prison, preferably in a body bag. Managing to kill them grants you a rare weapon drop.
• Hockey Mask and Chainsaw: The Psychos of the Prison present themselves as such, clearly evoking this trope. Letting them get too close will allow them to swing their chainsaws at you for a deadly stunning melee strike.
• Improvised Weapon:
  • Almost all the melee weapons fall into this category; Baseball bats, frying pans, shovels, screwdrivers, sledgehammers and more are at your disposal.
  • One of the common weapons you can use is a "Super Stapler". It fires staples in short bursts at close range and uses hunting ammo.
• "Instant Death" Radius: Sawbots in the Construction Site will kill you in a couple seconds if they get near you.
• Limited Loadout: Despite the absolute buttload of weapons at your disposal, you can only carry two guns (except for Cyborg, who can carry three) and one melee weapon at a time. You can add another gun slot using the Leg Holster augment.
• Mega City: It's right there in the name of the game. Not only is it called Mega City, but it encompasses every single stereotype about such a place; Urban Hellscape, MegaCorps, Cyberpunk augmentations and aesthetics everywhere, etc.
• MegaCorp: The final level takes place in the parking garage of one as you expose the corruption inside the company using bullets. The Final Boss is a mech at the very top of the Corp's headquarters.
• Mini-Mecha:
  • Exosuit, the gang leader of the Construction Site, uses some kind of load-lifter apparatus in battle.
  • The Final Boss is a huge bipedal mech owned by the MegaCorp.
• Molotov Cocktail: The Molotov enemy in the suburbs throws these at you, which leave behind a persistent fire puddle for a few seconds where they land.
• Money Is Experience Points: Killing criminals earns you money, which you can then use to purchase guns, ammo and upgrades in the shop between levels. While the guns aren't necessarily better than the ones you have, upgrades permanently improve your character for the rest of the run. You can also purchase contracts which allow you to make more money in the next stage if you complete a certain task.
• Necessary Drawback: Most of the strongest hitscan weapons (I.E. Blasters and Fusion guns) either have lackluster ammo conservation or are Powerful, but Inaccurate since they're capable of dealing insane damage from across a room instantly.
• Notice This: After defeating a boss, if the level you're in connects to an optional level, a mini-cutscene will play showing the route you can enter to go to said level.
• One Nation Under Copyright: Several fragmented references are made not to the "U.S.A", but the "U.C.A", with the "C" standing for "Corporations", demonstrating that like many Cyberpunk dystopias, the America of Mega City Force is one run by Mega Corps.
• "Pan Up to the Sky" Ending: The very last shot of the the game is the camera panning over the destroyed remains of the mech to show the sun rising over Mega City, signifying the hope the MCF has once again brought to its streets.
• Player Headquarters: The MCF base has everything a Mega City Force Agent needs to bring justice to the underworld; a shooting gallery and punching bag for training, a record room with tons of intel on your adversaries, and a box of donuts in the break room.
• Punch Parry: Right clicking with a ranged weapon equipped allows you to throw a short-range melee attack. Timing it right allows you to block certain incoming projectiles. Using a melee weapon changes this to your primary attack used with the left mouse button unless you have a gun equipped, in which case it upgrades said punch into the attack of whatever melee weapon you currently have equipped.
• Prison Riot: The Prison is perpetually in one, and it's your job to put an end to it since all the guards have been killed.
• Random Event: Sometimes while clearing a normal level, an event featuring enemies from one of the optional levels will bleed into whatever area of the level you just entered, whom defeating will reward you with rare items. These can include:
  • SURVIVE THE BREAKOUT!: A group of various Prison enemies are congregated somewhere in the room. Defeating them yields a rare weapon drop amongst one of their corpses.
  • SPECIAL DELIVERY FOR YOU!: Four Loaderbots from the Factory surrounding a delivery truck. Destroying them also grants weapons, and destroying the truck is guaranteed to grant the Exterminator Blaster.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay: Given that the average character's starting health is around 20 and enemies are capable of doing around 5 damage at a time, either you kill the criminals before they hit you or you're already dead. And that's not even getting into the bosses, who have attacks that can do upwards of 12 damage in a single hit.
• Self-Damaging Attack Backfire:
  • There is no protection from accidentally hitting yourself with a projectile, so it's a good idea to stand far away from walls, objects and the thing you're currently shooting at when shooting Explosive weapons lest you deal 26 damage to yourself and immediately die. The 1.04 Patch reduced the amount of self-inflicted explosive damage by half, somewhat mitigating this.
  • The Rigged Circular Saw weapon is a slug-thrower which fires Pinball Projectiles identical to the Sawyer enemy, but said projectiles can also bounce off of surfaces and hit you as well(which is almost always a One-Hit Kill), making it a Difficult, but Awesome weapon that rewards good accuracy.
• Sinister Subway: The Tunnels accessed from Japantown are a sprawling series of subway tunnels underneath the city which host an entire subteranean civilization of irradiated Mutants who want nothing more than to eat surface-dweller flesh. Notably, this is the only level that's not brightly lit, instead being very dark and only having a small radius of light around your character.
• Smashing Survival: Getting set on fire will cause you to take 1 persistent damage every second or so, forcing you to rapidly mash the E key to dispel the effect.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: When entering an optional level, you'll be greeted by two medkit stashes, allowing you an effective guaranteed heal to full health. You're going to need every bit of it.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Throwing melee weapons by right clicking with them equipped, whether they're sharp or blunt objects, are almost always a One-Hit Kill with whatever Mook they connect with. The thrown weapon will even return to your inventory after a few seconds so you don't have to pick it up.
• Trashcan Bonfire: These are scattered all over the Ruins. Some of them are still lit and can be destroyed to leave a lingering fire effect similar to a molotov.
• Universal Ammunition: Ammo is divided up into five types; Ballistic, Hunting, Explosive, Energy, and Nuclear. As long as a weapon falls into one of those types, it shares ammo with any other gun from that type.
• Urban Hellscape: Every area of Mega City you clear is filled to the brim with ne'er-do-wells and delinquents, and trash and graffiti abound. The Suburbs best exemplifies this, as it's a trash-riddled slum crawling with punks.
• Video Game Flamethrowers Suck:
  • Averted. Not only are the flamethrower-wielding Pyros some of the deadliest enemies in the game, but the Atomic Flamethrower is an insanely good Nuclear weapon which can atomize large crowds of enemies in an instant.
  • Also averted with Robot's Incendiary Unit unlockable starting weapon, which is a slightly less powerful version of the Atomic Flamethrower and is also great for clearing out big groups of enemies quickly.
• Wolfpack Boss: The gang bosses of Japantown are a trio of Yakuza called the Yōkai, and go by Kitsune, Tengu and Oni. Oni is a slow but powerful foe who will slap you silly with his kanabo if he gets in range, Kitsune is a deadly assassin who will run you down and chuck shuriken at you, and Tengu lights Japantown up with bullets if you get near him.
• Yakuza: The Japantown level is overrun with and controlled by the Yakuza. The bosses of the level are a trio of gang leaders name Kitsune, Tengu and Oni. Additionally, Mercenary's file says they are ex-Yakuza.
• You Nuke 'Em: One of the legendary rocket launchers is merely called the Tactical Nuke, and does ridiculously high damage.
• Zeerust: The game is heavily inspired by '80s depictions of Cyberpunk, right up to having everyone still listen to music on cassette tapes.
• Zombie Puke Attack: Spitters in the Tunnels are especially dangerous mutants due to their ability to launch gobs of irradiated slime at you which make parts of the floor untraversable, and also leave behind a puddle of the stuff when they die.

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♫I don't wanna say Good-bye...♫