A helicopter swoops over a palatial mansion as armed gunmen burst in, jamming cartridges into their shotguns, preparing for an epic firefight. Pretty soon bullets are tearing up the interior as bodies crash through glass walls, and grenades pass the camera in slow-motion arcs. Quickly, the action cuts to a high-speed car chase, with vehicles plummeting along LA’s iconic storm drains. The shooting never stops.

This is Battlefield: Hardline, the latest game in Electronic Arts’ long-running series of frenetic first-person shooters. As in previous instalments, players team up online to capture control points or carry packages through a gauntlet of enemy fire. But this time something’s different.

In the past, the battles were based around fictitious military conflicts; in Hardline, the bullet-riddled face-offs are between almost comically ruthless criminals and loose-cannon cops. Now, players aren’t fighting over territory in some vague Middle-Eastern setting, they’re clashing over stolen cars, bank vaults and methamphetamine production compounds. The rules of engagement are the same though: in Hardline, as in previous Battlefield titles, the firefights are often decided by who gets in the first accurate shot.

Some context. On 31 January, charges of reckless use of a firearm were dropped against police officer Joseph Weekley. He faced charges for fatally shooting a sleeping seven-year-old girl during a May 2010 police raid on her home in Detroit. He previously faced involuntary manslaughter charges, which were dismissed in October 2014 for a lack of evidence. The raid was filmed for an A&E reality television program.

In Hardline, the tanks and planes of previous games have gone, replaced by heavily armed officers, armoured trucks and helicopters. Grenades and rocket launchers are still a large part of gameplay, but there are also new law enforcement-themed additions. Here, players get to break out the tasers and tear gas – or in the game’s excitable parlance, “non-lethal takedowns”.

More context. On 12 December 2014, US district court judge Carol Jackson issued a restraining order against Missouri police on behalf of demonstrators protesting the shooting of Michael Brown. The order required the police to warn protesters and allow them to disperse before using tear gas.

So this is the problem. Battlefield: Hardline is a war game reskinned as a cops-and-robbers fantasy: the criminals are action-movie caricatures (they rob banks by blowing holes in the walls and steal sports cars to joyride around the city) and the cops are equally gung-ho.

Yet the game is being marketed at a time in which we could turn on the news at any minute and see armoured cars full of police in riot gear rolling down major city streets. Now even elements clearly cribbed from action movies recall recent and all-too-familiar instances of police brutality. At the Gamescom festival last August, the Hardline developers showed a tutorial where the player sneaks up on a criminal to strangle him with his handcuffs; it was difficult not to think of the 17 July choking death of New York man Eric Garner at the hands of police officer Daniel Pantaleo.

The Battlefield series has always been known for a verisimilitudinous approach to war games, with realistic ballistics and lethality – even if you do get to rejoin the fight a few seconds after death. And it’s true that war games have always glorified the military and dehumanised their targets. Marry this approach to a game about police and thieves, though, and you get uncomfortably close to home. Hardline is a game about policing in a fantasy world where crooks are signposted and deadly force is always justified. But perhaps we need to juxtapose this with a real world where police officers who hold those attitudes are shooting innocent people. Officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Ferguson teenager Michael Brown on 9 August, described the teenager as having a face “like a demon” and the suburb of St. Louis as “not an area where you can take anything really lightly” and “a hostile environment”.

Developer Visceral Games (of Dead Space fame) or publisher EA could not have predicted Ferguson, or how it brought racial policing tensions in the United States to the forefront. EA seems to be aware of the problem, as it delayed Hardline five months from its previously-planned October release. If the publisher had hoped to outlast police brutality tensions, it is out of luck. After three months of deliberations, a grand jury declined to indict officer Darren Wilson last November. Tempers remain high, in St. Louis, Missouri and across the United States.

It’s too late for significant change. Hardline is fundamentally a game about impossibly well-armed and capable supercriminals and how the police are justified in arming themselves to the teeth to deal with them, shooting first and asking questions later. At a time when US police appear to be doing just that, despite the absence of this game’s unambiguous enemies, is such unreconstructed entertainment really acceptable?