Play Mobile Police Patlabor Online

I picked up Mobile Police Patlabor for the Game Boy back in 1990, a time when portable games were mostly simple affairs. Bandai published this one, and it was based on the anime about a special police unit using giant robots called Labors. It was interesting to see a mech game on the small screen, trying to capture the scale of those machines with the hardware available.

You control a pilot from the Special Vehicles Section, moving your Labor through a series of side scrolling stages. Your main job is to stop rogue Labors causing havoc in the city. The gameplay involves walking, jumping across platforms, and using your Labor's extendable arm to punch enemies. You also have a gun with limited ammunition, so you have to be careful with your shots. The levels are fairly linear, but they require precise jumps and quick reactions to enemy attacks. The difficulty can be unforgiving, with some enemy patterns taking a few tries to learn. Navigating the urban wreckage in your machine feels surprisingly deliberate and heavy.