This Is the Police

TITP consists of two parts. One is time management game where you decide to send your cops in response to alarm calls from citizens. Another is visual novel - like story with dialogue choices, presented in quite unique art style. The game part is fairly well done and gives feeling of running real police department, the story is good and voice acting is excellent. There is, however, one piece of mechanics that ruins the experience for me: when City Hall decides you perform bad it cuts your budget and forced you to fire out cops, which makes you perform even worse. Developers openly admit that this creates a vicious circle that forces you to start over. Well, too bad I'm playing a game and abandoning my progress because I have no option of recovery is just not fun.

Game art, style and acting is all very good, especially for an indie. Ultimately though it's just a heavily scripted 'choose your own adventure' marketed as something else and fluffed up with a bunch of unnecessary filler in the mid-late game. The heavy scripting also means that two playthroughs and you've seen all there is to see, which is a shame because a just a little more flexibility (or procedural generation) it could have been a fairly clever game with plenty of replayability.

I really thought I would have the freedom to make all the tough choices throughout the game. If I wanted to be absolutely straight-laced and strive toward perfection, I could do that. And if I wanted to be entirely corrupt I could do that too, and anything in between. But what I found was that not only were certain situations completely out of my control, it wasn't possible to be squeaky clean at all, I was forced into making decisions I wouldn't have made. I was looking for a more varied dynamic and decided not to finish the game or buy any sequels. Maybe this was my fault for getting the wrong impression during the Kickstarter campaign, but either way I wasn't pleased with the result.

I've enjoyed a great deal this game. The sound is amazing, the plot is engaging. It's a piece of art that gets under your skin. Just when you are bored it breaks the monotony with minigames and new pieces of the story that keeps you engaged. Only suggestion I have to improve it is to make the available songs a bit longer. I've found that last-stage game songs were too short and I was constantly going to the cd-player. Although it's a weird but clever game mechanic to have to change the game screen to put music (as if you were really getting up your chair) I found it annoying near the end game. Lots of drama, lots of corruption, lots of bad decisions to make. A good game til the end.

I liked the story, I liked the art style and the way simple but effective comic-book style presentation accompanied by audio. I liked the idea that was clearly behind the game. This is largely where it all goes off the tracks. The idea of the game is good, but the execution is just too shallow. The game has no respect at all for the players time with story progress locked off behind the number of days passed. Those days are extremely repetetive, involving you dispatching police to answer calls and occasionally arranging clues to solve crimes. The problem is that this is the single biggest part of the game and it has no depth at all. To top if off, the police calls themselves lack any kind of flavour, all ending the same - suspect hurt/not hurt: Civilians hurt/not hurt: cops hurt/not hurt, and thats it. I took a break from the game and when I came back to it I just wanted to finish it. There must have been around 30 minutes of story left to experience, but I had to grind through close to 100 game days of that damnably shallow managment map to get to the end and I felt like it was all completely pointless and mind numbing. This game would have been better served by drastically reducing the length of the management aspect of the game because the simple truth is it is nothing but bloat dragging out the length of an otherwise short game. I would really have preferred that shorter game.