Highway Patrol II

In Highway Patrol II, you jump straight into the driver's seat of an American police cruiser, hunting down bank robbers across a open desert before they cross the border.

Chasing down felons in Highway Patrol II

Before you turn the key, you pick your target from a roster of fugitives. Harder criminals hand out bigger cash bonuses and speed up your promotions, but they also pull away faster on the open road. Once you take the case, gameplay shifts to a first-person view right through the windshield. Microïds built the desert using a smooth 3D vector road routine, giving the horizon a surprisingly fast sense of forward motion compared to many rival driving games of 1991.

Your goal is to force the getaway car off the road or get the driver to surrender. You have two main ways to bring a suspect to a halt:

• The soft way: Hit the siren to intimidate the fleeing driver, hoping they pull over without a fight.
• The hard way: Draw your shotgun and aim directly at their tyres while keeping the cruiser steady.

Catching a criminal is never just a straight drag race. Gangsters shoot back through their rear window, your engine overheats if pushed too hard, and taking a hit can blow out your tyres. Colliding with innocent civilian traffic drains your promotion points, making careless driving a quick path to a stalled career.

The dashboard and the desert compass

The dashboard graphic takes up the whole bottom half of your view, packing in gauges for speed, oil heat, and fuel levels alongside a directional compass. Because targets rarely stick to a single highway, keeping an eye on your instruments matters just as much as keeping your eyes on the pavement.

Fuel management becomes a serious issue on longer chases. You have to pull into roadside gas stations to refuel your cruiser before the tank runs dry. However, runaway gangsters will actively rob the gas stations along their escape route, occasionally leaving you stranded in the middle of nowhere with an empty tank and a dead engine.

When handling hits the ice

While the vector engine moves quickly, the driving mechanics suffer from an excruciating lack of grip. Steering your cruiser feels less like rubber gripping hot asphalt and more like figure skating on a sheet of smooth ice. The slightest overcorrection sends the car sliding sideways across the sand.

The environment offers no forgiveness for these slips. The desert landscape is littered with 100% indestructible concrete cacti and road signs. Swerving off the asphalt to dodge a civilian often results in slamming headfirst into a piece of desert flora that instantly wrecks your cruiser.

Navigation presents its own headache. The game lacks an on-screen mini-map or highway directional signs, forcing you to constantly pause to check your position on the map screen. One clever trick players discovered to bypass the winding roads is driving "as the crow flies" - ignoring the paved highway entirely and cutting a straight line across the open desert to intercept the suspect before they reach the border.

An odd detail that fans of European imports always point out involves the sound design. In the original French release, the developers left in a distinct, two-tone European police siren, despite the game being explicitly set in an American desert town.

How the MS-DOS release holds up today

Designed by Cédric Cazal and David Demaret, this release sits in a strange spot among early 90s action games. The Finnish gaming magazine Pelit described it at the time as a stripped-down duel between two cars handled in an interesting way. The core idea of balancing law enforcement tactics with high-speed navigation was ahead of what most arcade racers were trying back then, but the slippery controls and frequent map pauses hold it back from true greatness.

If you want to try this classic Microïds title, you can play Highway Patrol II online free in your browser right now. You can experience this odd piece of 1991 MS-DOS history directly in your browser window, with no setup required, to see if you can manage the slippery desert turns and land your first promotion.