THIS IS THE POLICE
Not completely criminal
Jack Boyd – police chief and jazz aficionado1 – has got style, but the more we see of him, the less substance we realise he has. Just like his game.
This Is The Police takes place across a scale model of the town of Freeburg, a prettily low-poly America-in-microcosm caught in the grip of identity politics, civil rights protests, organised crime, and the occasional flasher. 2 Your role – Jack’s role – isn’t to fix anything, really. You’re just keeping everything running, while pocketing enough money (made through legitimate bonuses, corruption-based brown envelopes, or both) to retire with a bulging nest egg. You do this through a real-time management game, responding to crimes with your rotating staff of varyingly talented cops, propped up by occasional text adventure sequences, storyboard-like mini-puzzles for unsolved cases, and an overarching tale that charts the decline of Freeburg’s Finest.
It is, for the first few hours, great: a gentle rush of conflicting systems and moral ambiguity that promises both real strategy intrigue (can I let a bereaved cop take the day off when I might need her to help take down a gang leader later?) and a pleasing nihilistic-noir storyline. Sadly, the more you play, the less there is. That rush of ideas screeches to a halt, leaving you in a mechanical limbo. Text adventure interludes are too easy to solve, and offer little closure. One moral choice (choosing a side in a Mob war) even removes one of the game’s more interesting mechanical ideas for hours.
There’s flair here, and a real push for something new, but these little niggles add up to make a game as flawed as its protagonist. Hal Tarrare