YMMV / Hopkins FBI

• Angst? What Angst?:
  • Hopkins dies, goes to Purgatory, and comes back. He hardly seems concerned about the implications of this.
  • Hopkins accidentally murders his own fiancée, but aside from uttering an monotone "Oh no," he doesn't seem particularly concerned. When you meet her later in the afterlife, neither does she.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The climactic battle against the villain is a scripted sequence in which Hopkins wins with no input from the player, or loses if you forget to disable the resurrection machine first.
• Awesome Music: "I Can't Control Myself" by The Troggs is pretty hard to get out of your head.
• Complete Monster:
  • Bernie Berckson, the head of a evil organization, has discovered a method of coming Back from the Dead. This allowed him to "survive" his own execution and escape from prison after being sentenced to death for nuking California and killing some 50,000 people. When FBI Agent J. Hopkins's girlfriend Samantha gets too close to discovering his hideout, he has her captured and uses her to play a sick game with Hopkins. He has four random women murdered, hides their bodies all over the city and sends Hopkins on a macabre scavenger hunt where he has to perform various tasks to discoverer the corpses, with the promises that the last corpse will reveal Samantha's location. Instead, however, he tricks Hopkins into killing his girlfriend by instructing him to shoot a paper target with the tied-up Samantha behind it. As a final insult Hopkins finds a video on her the corpse in which Bernie gleefully mocks him. Bernie could've killed both Samantha and Hopkins at any point he wanted, but instead decided to murder several innocents just so he could play his little game, proving that he truly is a monster.
  • The unnamed criminal in the brown jacket is a brutal and sadistic bank robber. Robbing the city's bank with an accomplice, he murders an employee for triggering the silent alarm and then kills another man during the hostage negotiations with the police. When Hopkins offers him an escape helicopter and himself as a hostage in exchange for the release of the other hostages, the robber seemingly agrees and releases three of their four hostages when Hopkins enters the bank, only for the man to suddenly slash the throat of the last hostage with a grin on his face. The two robbers then knock out Hopkins, escape with the helicopter, and later murder the police officer piloting it. Additionally, they also left an armed bomb inside the bank that would've killed several people if Hopkins hadn't managed to disarm it.
• Designated Hero: Hopkins is described as a "modern day hero and full time righter-of-wrongs" on the back of the package. However, the puzzle design regularly requires him to commit crimes for no readily-apparent reason, most frequently theft. In the first act of the game, the only method to stop a group of bank robbers is to use excessive force by blowing them up in their hideout with a live grenade, which also incinerates all but $20 of the stolen money. Hopkins must then steal the $20 so he can much later use it to pay for a movie ticket. Following this incident, he must shoot out his fiancée Samantha's bathroom door lock before he finds out she's been kidnapped, and must steal from her house to solve Bernie Berckson's Criminal Mind Games. Doing so also requires vandalism and destruction of property, as part of this involves melting a wax museum statue in full public view during business hours to reveal the murder victim that Berckson hid inside of it. Finally, the endgame requires Hopkins to create a clone of himself and then murder him, so that the clone, now in Purgatory, can sabotage the machine that Berckson uses to resurrect himself.
• Fetish Retardant: Most people would assume that the murder victims that Hopkins "investigates" were intended as Fan Disservice; however, the way they're presented and how Hopkins barely reacts to the violent fates these poor women suffer (such as the helicopter pilot, whose body was desecrated afterwards) seems to indicate that disservice was not what the game was aiming for. The results are as repulsive as you'd think.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Originally developed and released in France, the game became quite popular in Poland as a high-profile release from CD Projekt, complete with an Ensemble Cast of actors providing the voices (albeit the final result was not as well received as other fully dubbed titles released by CD Projekt at the turn of the century).
• Narm: The plot gets so ridiculous at times that one can't help but laugh. The many typos in the English version's dialogue don't help, and neither do the absurd puzzle solutions.
  • Just one example: The evil terrorist's name is Bernie Berckson (although, this being a French game, it might more be unfortunate happenstance as extremely few non-native speakers of English are aware of the vulgar connotations of the word "berk").
  • How do you gain access to an all-powerful machine? Bribe its only guard with peanuts.
  • How do you gain access to a secret island factory? Just steal a scientist's coat. No need for a mask or anything.
• Quirky Work: Part of the game's charm is how it moves from being a police procedural with the FBI to suddenly being a science fiction fantasy mishmash with almost no fanfare. Bernie's mysterious escape from the electric chair ends up being the result of him achieving Resurrective Immortality by means of being the only person in Limbo's waiting area to get past the guard protecting the transporter back to the realm of the living consistently before Hopkins figures out a similar trick. The player moves from corporate espionage while checking out a chemical factory to finding out the factory has a secret elevator down to a submarine dock that Hopkins then rides to a massive underwater spider dome complex that Bernie somehow had the resources to not only build without anyone the wiser but also staff with hundreds of armed guards and scientists. At no point does the game stop to have its characters comment on how absurd the plot gets, but that just makes it all the more endearing and a major source of the So Bad, It's Good opinion of the game.
• So Bad, It's Good: One of the very few video game examples of this trope that manage to be ridiculously designed and written while staying perfectly playable throughout their entire run.

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