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In 2022 I played Chicken Police: Paint it RED! On the PS5. Chicken Police: Into the HIVE! takes place after Chicken Police: Paint it RED! and is currently only available on Steam. Chicken Police: Into the HIVE! will be coming to PlayStation, Switch, and Xbox consoles soon.

Sonny Featherland is nearing retirement and is in the process of packing up his office in preparation to travel the world. While lost in his thoughts, he’s interrupted by a female insect asking him to look into the disappearance of her husband’s buried body. In this animal kingdom, insects are considered third class citizens and are segregated to live in an area called The Hive. Things are bad in the hive. The residents are starving and gang violence is on the rise. There’s a new meat factory opening up, but it’s run by a bunch of thugs and is shrouded in mystery.

Despite his better judgment, Sonny agrees to take on the case. He meets his partner, Marty McChicken, who is drunk and in the process of having his belongings thrown out of the window by his wife. Because he’s not welcome at home, Marty agrees to join Sonny on one last mission before he retires. Even if it gets their boss mad at them (again).

While working on this unofficial case, Sonny and Marty are given the official task of protecting a high-profile actor who is being blackmailed for cheating on his new wife. Between these two cases, the Chicken Police will have plenty of opportunities to search for clues, interrogate people of interest, solve puzzles and play minigames. If you don’t get too caught up in the minigames, you can complete this noir adventure game in under ten hours. If you enjoy earning game achievements, you’ll have to get good at the minigames. I earned a couple of Steam achievements by doing well at the shooting range.

Like its predecessor, Chicken Police: Into the HIVE! is primarily a point and click adventure game where you have to observe your surroundings to gather clues and unlock topics to discuss with various characters throughout the game. I like how there is a magnifying glass on the upper left hand side of the screen that will point out all of the items/areas that can be interacted with.

There are a handful of characters that you’ll have to interrogate to progress the story. You get to decide the tone of your questioning and each character has a method that works best for them. Will you be a good cop, neutral, or bad cop? After the interrogation you’ll get scored between zero and five stars. If you’re not happy with your results (or get a zero) you can retry and refine your technique.

The dialogue in this game is very vulgar and earthy. Every word in the book is used including the F-bomb. Even alternatives like “what the cluck!” are used. There’s a unity church that’s emerging in the hive to assist with feeding the needy. Sadly, religion is not shown in a good light in this title.

There is a lot of blood and violence. Dismemberment is shown and you’ll be tasked with performing an autopsy on an insect’s body. Female anatomy is accentuated with some tight fitting dresses. Some of the dialogue is sexually charged, though things are toned down since the previous game this time around.

I like how you can play in a mostly black and white noir style or colorized. I opted for color, but when playing on systems other than my gaming desktop I first installed it on, I had to tweak a configuration file to enable the colorized version of the game. Other than the colorization glitch, Chicken Police: Into the HIVE! ran great on my Steam Deck.

Like the previous game, Chicken Police: Into the HIVE! has excellent voice acting. The dialogue is funny too. I love how Marty points out and says “Title drop!” whenever someone said “into the hive”. The background music and sound effects don’t disappoint either.

If you enjoyed Chicken Police: Paint it RED! you’ll definitely want to check out Chicken Police: Into the HIVE!. While you can play Chicken Police: Into the HIVE! first, you’ll miss some of the character development from the previous game so I recommend playing them in order. Without giving away any spoilers, some people are disappointed with the ending and I was a little bummed by it. I hope there will be more titles in this series and I look forward to checking out more games from The Wild Gentlemen.