This Is the Police

Firstly, the positives: the management of a police force and assignment of officers and detectives to crimes and cases is generally enjoyable. Voice acting is pretty good and music sets the mood well. The Poker was fun. Secondly, the negatives: -Too few animations, way too many still shots with voice-overs (that's like the other 5% of the game) -You literately play 95% of the time looking at a mini-map of the city in your office -The story is so crazy as to be unbelievable: journalists offer you money to kill your own officers (and the game presents it to you as an assignment), serial killers contact you asking for dead bodies, the mayor tells you to fire all black police officers because of pressure from Neo-Nazis. -Sometimes simple choices have HUGE and implausible irreversible effects on gameplay: For example, I decided to try fuel for the patrol cars from an old business partner, which meant a kickback for me and as a result, for the next two weeks until the end of the game, I had to watch 2-3 of my officers die in car crashes every day, making the game almost unplayable. Seriously, what fuel causes cars to crash? -You can sometimes make choices for your officer’s actions on a call, but they are so simple as to be redundant: a) use taser 2) throw a book at them 3) ask them for some drugs. The answer 90% of the time is TASER. The other 10% is mostly SHOOT. -There are points in the game where you are away from the department for health reasons, when you get back all the staff are exhausted and drunk without any real explanation. -The representation of the church in the game is ridiculous. The Bishop heads a drug gang and “blesses” the drugs by bleeding on them… -The save system is not well-implemented. -I THINK there are politics behind the game, but they are done so poorly, I can’t quite tell. It feels less like a simulation of a police department than it does a study in the rather negative stereotypes the far left holds about the police.

I want to be honest with you guys: When a grenade crashed through the kitchen window of Jack Boyd in a short comic scene because I could not do enough good for the mafia, I cheered. Game over. Finally. As a game, "This Is The Police" is terribly boring. It consists of dragging policeman cards on policeman squares - and of waiting. After two hours I had seen everything. After ten, I wanted a different job. The secret of the other big bureaucracy simulator, "Papers, Please", is this: Papers, Please is an ingenious puzzle game even without its decision making about life and death. "This Is The Police" is a simple strategy game with a mean death spiral. Maybe that would not be so frustrating if the game had anything important to say. But it does not. The main messages of this game are: "Politicians are evil, perverted and corrupt", "The police is obedient to organized crime", "Only heroes are true men" and so more cliches like that. If I wanted to read about dumb stereotypes I could just turn on Facebook and read some comments. I don't really need this game for having that kind of experience...

Already been said, the game is nicely designed, the voice acting is superb and the general atmosphere is great. Music is fantastic. On the negative side, the gameplay itself. At some point, the repetitive action becames exhausting, and you get to go on only to see the cutscenes. It would need a story-mode to progress faster. The story and the character developement is almost grotresque; that would be acceptable if the game was a bit more entertaining and less repetitive.

The first half of this game is awesome in every sense of the word. You're just trying to do your best and keep Freeburg from descending into chaos by managing a mid-sized town's PD, but it isn't as easy as it sounds. Your cops will die, their spirits won't be into their jobs, they'll call in sick three days in a row and you're forced to keep them on your payroll because they're the best cop in the city you can get right now. This plays through a mix between a top-down manager game and choose-your-own-adventures. You assign cops to different incidents that happen, and when they get there, it'll either resolve without your intervention, or it'll be a scenario that requires judicious decision making, like talking someone off the ledge of a building, or handling a hostage situation. It's easy going at first, but as crime ramps up you'll end up a day late and a dollar short almost all of the time, and you have to hope to god that your useless old-ass cop that you keep around just for days like this can handle a robbery by himself. [spoilers begin] The story, however, drops this game sharply from a 5 start to a 3. Jack Boyd starts off as an interesting enough character - your average fat, old, soon-to-retire police chief who just wants to go home - but once your involvement with the mafia begins, Jack goes on a forced character arc that ruined the entire game for me. It starts off as a hollow mechanic where you occasionally have to ALSO send cops to mob crimes to act as protection, but once the mob feud ends and Jack's character arc really kicks in, you're forced to play as a 'bad' cop who's edgy, dyes his hair, drives a hotrod around, and a bunch of other shit...while this also has no bearing on the game whatsoever. So while my desire to play out TITP as a stressed-out 'good' cop who just wanted to retire was shot completely by an arc that didn't feel as if I had chosen it, the gameplay remained mostly the same - and as such, the choices felt both hollow and forced.

Every review already says how the game is, half visual novel, half minigames, half police-chief-sim-city. The game contains a lot of fun gags, interesting mechanics, lots of options, and I think it's pretty fun to play. However: 1- there are a lot of mechanics that could be polished a lot, they got some original ideas that weren't exploited nor develpoed enough. 2-SLOW, specially at the end game. This is a sim, with a in-game clock which measures the default game time. And there is absolutely no way to speed it up, you have to suck up tons of real life minutes each game day in watching a progress bar go up and down... The first time you play through the rough police days it's all fun, but it gets boring quickly, and having no fast-forward mechanic is a HUGE con. This almost made me quit the game so many times. 3- Can be repetitive, some of the scenes like he starting his car each day can get insanely boring, and the sound on those scenes is LOUD.