It's a pretty fun game...for about five minutes.
Virtua Cop is your basic light gun arcade shooter, you travel along a rail; most of the time having to deal with random guys in black suits popping out to shoot at you. Now this would seem like it would be hard to take out all of those baddies, right? No, Sega decided to dumb it down by putting huge cursors around every enemy that gave away their positions immediately. The cursors also changed colour when they were about to fire so you could easily predict when to take them out without losing health. The bosses weren't much trouble either; like the enemies they all had very predictable attack patterns and were just pushovers really, they just had more health. I also wasn't too fond of the hostages you had to save; all they did was get in the way and scream "Help me!", and if that's not enough you lost health if you accidently (or intentionally) shot one of the little buggers!
The graphics were revolutionary for 1994 in the arcades, but today the game just has not aged very well; most people know that the Saturn could not do 3D graphics as well as its rivals the PSX and N64, and the early Saturn 3D games are really ugly nowadays. It was pretty impressive back in the day to see a 2D focused console to pull off 3D character models and backgrounds like this, but again this game won't turn heads with its visuals today on even back in the mid 90's. The music was bland, generic action music (if you can call it that) and overall it was pretty lame; in fact I couldn't really listen to it most of the time because I was too busy shooting stuff. The voiceovers of some of the characters is kinda funny because it is just bad, I mean the first boss of the game sounds like he's Elmer Fudd if he were a bodybuilder, and those hostages sounded like they had Downs Syndrome (no offence to anyone).
Overall, I briefly enjoyed Virtua Cop and I tend to pop in every now and again to kill ten minutes. But it's just too easy for a game with a gamepad, and if I had a lightgun it would probably be even easier and don't get me started on two-player mode. The audio is boring when you can hear the BGM, and the visuals that weren't too great to begin with back in 1994 are ancient by current standards, and most gamers will hate looking at it. This game was originally a pack-in for the Saturn and is now one of the most common games for the system, don't spend more than a buck or two on this game if you want it. It's a nice distraction for the circumstances, but I think that this was the overall the weakest of the three Saturn pack-in games from the era (the others were Virtua Fighter 2 and Daytona USA). If you are in need of a few lightgun games for your Saturn, then by all means try this out but remember that their are superior games out there for the platform.