However, she is soon confronted by the reality of policing in the Hive City she inhabits, and is approached by a secret clique of police officers who abandon the written law entirely and only seek to further their own ends. Things don't stand still while she wrestles with the moral quandaries of that decision, and the struggles between the city’s various factions, such as The Syndicate and the local mutants, heat up. Katy can favour one faction over others in her line of duty, which increases her standing with them at the expense of others, and opens up alternate storylines.
This game provides examples of the following tropes:
- Action Girl: Katy herself, of course.
- The female squad-members assigned to Katryn can also fulfill this trope.
- Artificial Stupidity: The enemy AI is pretty good, capable of exploiting cover and line-of-sight ranges to fight pretty effectively. The AI-controlled friendly cops, however, can do no such thing and will frequently just shoot at point-blank range or run mindlessly back-and-forth.
- Bad "Bad Acting": Another relic of the awful translation in the English version.
- "Blind Idiot" Translation: The English translation was no better than that of Pathologic or Paradise Cracked. The title itself is a great example: the punk rock-like “Power of law” is a mistranslation of ( Власть закона), i.e. the rule of law.
- Boss in Mook Clothing: RoboRats, whose heavy machine guns are the bane of players early on in the game.
- Critical Existence Failure: Averted, being injured will negatively impact the accuracy of a character.
- Cyberspace: Present, and you get to visit it occasionally.
- Early Game Hell: Much like in X-COM, the early-game armor is no better at protecting your characters than modern "bulletproof" vests. Dying in a single hit is entirely possible.
- Expansion Pack: Only released in Russia is the "Police Stories" expansion, adding three side missions to the game and the game itself was originally intended as one for Paradise Cracked.
- Fake Difficulty: Robot enemies that you start encountering from the Syndicate Factory onwards are completely unfair to fight, capable of running across half the map in one turn and instantly killing your characters in a burst of minigun fire/melee/rockets, save scumming and exploiting their AI is effectively the only way to deal with them.
- Fetch Quest: Plenty of them feature, both as sidequests, and as part of the main storyline.
- Fog of War: A mild variety, as you can still see the level layout beyond your characters’ line of sight; you simply can’t see the enemies. Unfortunately, your squad members always have unnaturally low range of vision at low levels and cannot see further then a dozen paces ahead of them.
- Gangsta Style: Pistols are used this way when doing normal shots with a two-handed grip used with Aimed Shots.
- Grid Inventory: Present here. In addition, there’s also a carrying capacity based on the characters’ current strength. While going over this capacity doesn’t freeze you on the spot, it will significantly reduce the number of action points available to the overloaded character.
- Kill It with Fire: Like in Paradise Cracked, the studio’s previous project, various incendiary weapons are very popular in 2170. There are guns firing incendiary bullets, incendiary grenades and flamethrowers. There’s a good reason for that, too: characters are soon set on fire and receive hefty amounts of damage every turn.
- Luck-Based Mission:
- The "Syndicate Factory" mission is this, it's clearly designed for your more heavily armored/equipped allies to handle most of the mission but the shoddy nature forces you to engage with enemies that can instantly kill your units randomly on the default difficulties from ranges where you can't hope to return fire.
- "Interstate 44" can become impossible to complete deathless due to the random enemy spawns when starting a map putting overpowered robots too close as well as the randomness of the "God of War" robots.
- MegaCorp: The Syndicate, which are one of the game’s many factions. You can assist them in their goals, (like wiping out mutants) increasing your standing with them, or work with their rivals instead.
- Mini-Mecha: There are some powerful mechs equipped with lasers in the game. To make matters worse, they are every bit as accurate as you would expect from a computer system with superhuman reaction time.
- Mood Whiplash: The story segment where you fight evil clowns that have giant, man-sized candles as supporting units looks positively bizarre in contrast to the Cyberpunk grittiness of corrupt corporations, crime bosses and mutant gangs that comes before and after even if it's due to taking place in virtual reality.
- Police Brutality: As expected of a Cyberpunk world. Katryn can try to avoid it or get on it as well: see Video Game Cruelty Potential below.
- Prequel: To Paradise Cracked.
- Purely Aesthetic Gender: There’s no functional difference between male and female companions.
- Rat Stomp: Those rats are mutants, however, and can wield guns as well as anyone else. God help you if you encounter even larger RoboRats with heavy machine guns…
- Rodents of Unusual Size: The mutated, sentient rats, capable of operating tech and wielding firearms, are rather frequent in the slums, and have become so common even the police had accepted their existence as a given by the time the game begins.
- Sidetrack Bonus: There are plenty of nooks and crannies with bonus items on the maps.
- Trial-and-Error Gameplay: There’s no tutorial in the game; it just begins and leaves you alone to figure out all its systems.
- Unusual Weapon Mounting: The giant RoboRats have heavy machine guns mounted on their backs.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: Some characters give you plot items and activate the exit to a level when talking with them but if your inventory is full when you talk to them, they'll be dropped to the ground, if you don't notice this you can accidently leave without the item and be trapped in a state where the plot can't progress and you can't return to the previous level..
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: Don’t feel like getting permits so that a local boss can let you through? Just shoot him and his gang on the spot (if you can manage it).
- Another example is to do with your team-mates. The fastest way to obtain best armour and weapons is to stand aside in every fight until your AI Police allies are dead, then loot their equipment. There’s no punishment for that in the game, and there’ll always be more randomly generated troops for your next mission.
- The choices you face when siding with the factions allow for plenty of this. Why follow the law and help out a bunch of mutants that nobody likes anyway, when you can murder them all to clear the premises for a ruthless MegaCorp that’ll give you a hefty reward for doing so?
