This Is the Police

I love this title's gameplay loop and story, they seem disconnected at first but when story is relatively slow-paced and relaxed, the game is also quite an easy and soothing experience, especially when you decide to buy and play these awesome jazz records, but when the story starts getting tense and uneasy, the gameplay becomes much harder and stressful at times, even the music selection changes from slow, melancholic jazz and happy swing music to loud and bombastic synth tracks. The story is phenomenal and greatly enhances something that would be a fun but also quite repetitive game, it makes you engaged both in its narration and gameplay scenarios and when the game started to become a little bit boring for me, the story started gaining momentum and drawing my full attention again. It's a great, unique and really stylised adventure that I will never forget, it's a game that's easy to get into but really hard to let go when you become attached to the main character and his journey through crime, corruption and tough, morally grey decisions.

A more detailed video review can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76D9GOjYZmg This is the Police is a very story-centric title, despite the appearances. The police dispatcher component is window dressing, since unless you are abysmally bad at it, it won't change the outcome of the story. Which is kinda bad considering the pacing's all over the place, with plenty of stretches where you just pass from one day to the next with nothing interesting in between. But the story's where the game shines. You're playing as the police chief Jack Boyd, voiced by John St. John of Duke Nukem fame. There's a lot on the plate, and plenty of interesting stories to see. Most importantly, the writing and voice acting makes the whole game work. The boring stretches of the gameplay are worth going through because the cutscenes make up for all that. If you enjoy a good story with good characters, this is the game for you. But if you fall for the "police management simulator 2022" vibes, then I'm sorry for your disappointment.

+ nice story + pretty good music and voice acting + nice gameplay... - which getting boring after 3 hours - mini-games - choices hardly matter (especially on ending)

I really liked the idea and hoped for a slowly rising difficulty. Boy, was I wrong. The whole thing falls apart with day 3, when you are ordered to fire all afro-american cops because of some gang-related crime. It forces you to sabotage your own work, to put cops on unsolveable assignments. Why? So they can be legally fired, because they screwed up. But you get only 2 days to do this, so you MUST work toward a all-white roster from day 2 (day 1 is just a multiple-choice press conference). Putting such an obstacle right at the start is a very bad way to get your players invested. And I am tired to start over, because some random event kills half of my roster. So random! It´s a real letdown because of the interesting setting, cool jazz soundtrack and overall style. Sad.

Great game, something I've never seen before. Wish you wouldn't have to click through so much junk between days. Would reccomend to buy if it was <$10.