Publisher: Sierra
Developer: Sierra
Year: 1993
Platform: DOS; Windows; Mac

Sierra hired Daryl F. Gates, the former LAPD chief and founder of SWAT, to help design the fourth installment in this best-selling series. His lifetime of experience no doubt helped ensure Police Quest 4 felt realistic when it came to police culture and tactics. However, his ability to design an adventure game is not readily apparent.

Sonny Bonds is nowhere to be seen, which is fine given that the Lytton saga seemed to have run its course. However, our new L.A. detective John Carey is seen quite often, and he is about as interesting to watch as C-SPAN. His coworker and friend has been murdered, so John has been assigned to the case. You must take notes, take pictures, fill out forms, talk to a lot of people, collect and submit evidence, take notes, fill out forms…

Most of the game is as repetitive and monotonous as the previous sentence. At one point Carey even laments how tedious his job is. Well, thanks for making me a part of it! Some tense action sequences are mixed throughout the game, but using your firearm somehow requires more pointing and clicking than ever, making these sections more annoying than fun. And even if you gave the game credit for being a realistic simulation (which I don’t), the design choices undermine it every chance it gets.

For starters, nearly every character you meet, like Detective Carey, is made of cardboard. Some of them have attitude, but no personality. The one exception is the coroner, who cracks every joke possible about the cadavers he’s cutting into.

Secondly, the insistence on inserting traditional adventure-game puzzles ruins any chance that this game could have been hailed as an accurate police simulation. There is one puzzle near the end that is extravagantly silly, involving a stray dog and a rope. It was as if they ran out of time to connect the developing story to the endgame already in place, and in came the canis ex machina. While the endgame is intense, by that time I was not invested in the story enough to care.

Gates’s lone traditional adventure game tried to be all things to all people, and wound up being very little to a very few. I cannot recommend this game to even the most dedicated adventurer. Use only as a sedative.