Every good highway race needs someone trying to stop it. In Sadak Fury that someone is the highway police: officers in khaki and white helmets with a blue band, on bikes with red and blue lights, and every one of them carries a lathi.
The police have three jobs in the game. They add danger to every race, they remember you across your career, and in one mode, you become them.
Getting BUSTED
Cops park on the shoulder and wait. When the pack comes through, they pull out and chase the nearest rider. If you end up off your bike within 25 m of a cop, or a cop knocks you off, you're BUSTED: the race is over and you pay a fine.
Cops get tougher as you climb the leagues:
- Early leagues: cops never swing at you. They only arrest riders who have already fallen, which makes them a hazard you learn to read rather than a wall.
- Later leagues: they swing their lathis, and they arrest rivals too, which can be very handy.
- They give up. No cop chases you forever. After a while they peel off and wait for the next race.
You can fight back. Cops can be knocked off like anyone else, and it pays better than knocking off a rival. It also makes them angrier.
The wanted level
Your career keeps a police record: a wanted level from 0 to 5 stars, running from CLEAN through SUSPECT, WATCHED, HUNTED and MOST WANTED to PUBLIC ENEMY.
It rises when you hit cops, knock them off, escape them or run their roadblocks, by at most two stars a race. It falls with clean races, paid fines, time, and a bit of police duty (more on that below). The police treat you differently at each level:
- 0 to 2 stars: they only react to trouble near them.
- 3 stars: they chase you on sight, and they hunt only you.
- 4 stars: two extra cops join the race, and there's a ROADBLOCK: three police bikes across the left lane, with a gap on the right if you're brave. A warning appears 300 m before it, so you always get a chance.
- 5 stars: more cops, two roadblocks, and they never give up. Get busted now and your bike is impounded.
An impound doesn't end your career. The LOCKUP screen lets you ride another bike from your garage, pay to get yours back, or work it off. They never take your only bike.
Police duty: ride the police bike
From the main menu, POLICE puts you on the police bike, lights flashing and lathi in hand, in a race full of racers who want nothing to do with you. Your job is to bust five of them on a full run, or four on a sprint.
A bust takes two steps. Knock a racer off his bike, then pull up and stop beside him before he gets back on. The camera cuts to the arrest, and you move on to the next one. A racer who crosses the finish line has escaped.
You score more for busting the race leader and the most wanted rider, and a bonus if nobody escapes. Most racers just run, but some of them fight back. You can be knocked off on police duty, but you can never be busted.
In a career, a completed duty shift also lowers your wanted level and works off part of an impound. Sometimes the fastest way out of trouble is to put on the uniform for a day.
What went wrong along the way
Busted almost every race. We have an automated test rider that races the game over and over and logs what happens. In one batch it was BUSTED in 38 races out of 48. The cops rode with the pack all the way to the finish, so any fall anywhere meant an arrest. That's when cops learned to give up, and the test rider's podium rate went up with it.
The 14 km/h crawl. In one test, two cops waited in the rider's own lane on a mountain road and held him to walking pace for over 2 km. Now cops wait on the shoulder.
A wanted level that helped you. At 4 stars the police busted all seven rivals in one test race, which made the race easier, not harder. Now a high wanted level makes the police focus on you alone. Riding past a cop also no longer counts as escaping him.
Arrests you couldn't see. On police duty, the bike stopped 15 to 35 m past the fallen racer, and passing lorries hid the arrest. Now you pull up properly, and the arrest camera picks the best of several spots by the road to show the moment.
Leading all of this is Inspector Rao, the highway officer every rider in the league knows by name. You'll meet him in the comics.
Read more about the riders you race against, or see the police on the home page.
