Naked Gun I.C.U.P. Review (iOS)

Naked Gun I.C.U.P. is a point and click controlled adventure, following the haphazard detective Frank Drebin Jr, who works for the I.C.U.P. (I See You Pee, geddit?) unit of the police. Naked Gun you say? Yes, indeed it is the very same movie trilogy, in a video game resurrection. Or tries to be.

You control Frank Jr by touch-pressing through lots of conversation, and simply pressing areas of the screen to move/pick up objects. More oddly, you’ll be picking up lots of loose cash, more like a tramp than a cop. The money can be used to buy hints to solve the more cryptic clues, in an ode to Professor Layton, or for making phone calls at pay phones.

There are limited shoot-out moments, where tapping your finger at the on screen targets shoot them down, gallery style. As you plod along (sorry, another cop joke there), you pick up multiple cases to solve, and all are managed with a menu system not too dissimilar to the Skyrims/Fallouts of this world. Except on an iPhone, where it’s far too small and therefore fiddly to touch screen your way around it with any great conviction.

Being an iPhone/iPad app, I read the game title as “i-cup” to begin with. The real pronunciation is a joke so bad I even missed it the first time. It doesn’t get much better from there. Trust me, there are no ‘like a midget in a urinal, I would have to be on my toes’ gems here. The dialogue is very flat, dull and the jokes are poor, and there is lot of it. I found myself skipping all the conversations as they are mostly irrelevant, unfunny drivel.

This feeble attempt to resurrect the hilarious movie franchise of the same name is both a travesty and a crying shame. It really is a missed opportunity. Naked Gun I.C.U.P. plays much like any current Telltale Games release (bar the menu system), but the script and characters just kill it. The humour truly brings out the ‘dead’ in deadpan, with jokes so flat that ex-Frank Drebin himself Leslie Nielsen would turn in his grave. Where Telltale’s The Walking Dead adds to an already successful franchise, I.C.U.P. proves this one should not be resurrected. Go watch the movies instead.