What would you do if you were the chief of police with six
months left in your job before being forcibly retired? Do you do your best to
maintain law and order in the corrupt city you spent your life protecting, or
do you join the corruption and set yourself up a nice little retirement fund?
This is the situation posed in This is the Police, you are
Jack Boyd, Chief of Freeburg Police, when the mayor of the city decides it’s
time for you to retire, conveniently your wife has also run off with another
man, you have nothing in the way of savings, and the local crime bosses have
their sights firmly set on seeing that you don’t make it to retirement.
From there the scene is set, 180 days of work left, make
$500,000 to retire with, how you manage that is up to you, initially you main
source of income is the wage you get as head of the city Police, but through an
unfortunate situation with your deputy, you wind up having to deal with
criminal kingpin Christopher Sand, though as well as choosing to provide police
assistance whenever he might call on you, the opportunity is there to have him
sell any evidence you might find at various call-outs, drugs, weapons, and
jewellery can all fetch good prices for you to add to your slush fund.
Along the way you may also find members of your team will
get themselves killed in the line of duty, delaying the paperwork of their
death could mean their wage continues coming into the department for a few
extra days, but an unannounced budget cut could see your otherwise sturdy and
capable force reduced in numbers, forcing you to tread the uneasy path between
picking and choosing what emergencies you respond to, some may even be false
alarms, using up your already limited officer numbers.
You keep watch over Freeburg from Jack’s office, your view
is an isometric map of the city with incoming alerts appearing in the top-left
of the screen, holding the left trigger gives you the details of the call and
choice of who you choose to send in response, depending on the severity of the
situation might just require a couple of experienced officers, or even the SWAT
team and the Paddy Wagon for those larger-scale emergencies.
Once they’ve reached their destination an alert pops up on
the top-right of the screen, the right trigger gives you the arrival report,
hopefully you sent enough capable officers to quell the situation, if things
aren’t as simple as you’d hoped, you’re given choices for how your officers
should proceed, surrounding a building or charge in guns-blazing, threaten the
suspect or negotiate a peaceful resolution, make the right choice and criminals
end up cuffed and your officers gain experience, choose badly and the perp
could escape, civilians could get hurt, or worse, your officers could wind up
dead.
From time to time, investigations will crop up among the
call-outs you’ll receive, send detectives to a crime scene and you’ll soon find
yourself attempting to solve a homicide, a bank heist or the theft of some
priceless artworks, you’re initially given a storyboard with only the first and
last images filled in, and assigning detectives to a case will, over time grant
you more pictures to fill in the gaps, whether they’re the right scenes is down
to the skills of your detectives, and getting the right order of events is
dependent on you reading the witness reports and piecing together exactly what
happened.
These cases progressively get tougher, with the
amount of pictures increasing in number as you gradually solve them, get
everything correct and you can send your lead detective with some officers to
arrest the suspect, some situations may even lead to taking down a gang, use
the suspect you’ve arrested to rat out his leader and you could find yourself
unravelling a bigger criminal network, in turn pleasing the Mayor and City
Hall, gaining favour with the general public and overall making the city a
safer place, for the moment anyway.
Keeping everyone happy is your overall goal, if the folks at
City hall are satisfied with your work they’ll keep your budget intact, even
granting you additional funding for extra officers or upgrading your SWAT team,
treading a fine line between sides in the mob war could mean the difference
between life and death, every choice you make has consequences, right down to
whether or not you let a particularly tired member of your force take an extra
day off.
When your day ends you can breathe a brief sigh of relief
that you made it through another, sporadically between days you’ll be treated
to new chapters in the story, fans of old-school games “Another World” and
“XII” will enjoy the style these scenes are presented in, minimalist character
models and backgrounds, mostly static, with the occasional subtle movements of
scenery or props to accentuate what is happening on-screen, merely there as a
visual aid to what we’re experiencing aurally.
For me the real star of the show in This is the Police is
the audio, it could almost be a noir fiction radio drama for the quality of the
voice-over work as the story unfolds, with Jon “Duke Nukem” St. John providing
perfect characterisation of the game’s protagonist Jack Boyd, backed up by an
excellent supporting cast, the sound effects are subtle but effective, with the
majority of music being what songs from Jack’s expandable personal library you
choose at the beginning of another day protecting your city.
For what has gone into the game in terms of story, ideas and
the overall presentation, it’s sad to say that in the gameplay is where it
comes up short, managing your team, investigating cases and performing favours
for the mob are all fun to begin with, juggling your squad depending on the
severity of the situations, using your best judgement to prevent things getting
out of hand, and the urge to play just one more day to see what it might bring
is great, unfortunately it can all become quite repetitive.
Once you’ve tapped your foot to “Sweet Ginger Green” for the
umpteenth time, found yourself inundated with calls and no spare officers to send,
and twiddled your thumbs waiting for your detectives to come up with new slides
in their investigations, the novelty has worn off, the enjoyment of protecting
and serving the city you’ve invested time in dulls, and though the variety in
call-outs and tasks you and your squad must face is substantial, I found it a
chore getting through the days.
Having given it thought, it’s entirely possible that I’m
simply not very good at the game, but often the simplest of mistakes can cause
you to be punished, through the loss of a team member or the cutting of your
budget following The Mayor’s dissatisfaction with your work, the biggest
problem being that without sufficient resources you’re unable to achieve suitable
results and any subsequent recovery is painfully slow and more often than not, unlikely.
With a little more variety in gameplay and a bit
more depth to the management mechanics, This is the Police could have been engaging
and thoughtful, however with frequent long stretches between new story chapters
and few moments where your decisions actually make any difference overall, the
game ends up as very average, a great story, if a tad drawn-out, unique visuals
and pleasing audio, hampered by limited satisfaction for any of your actions, here’s
hoping these elements are improved on in the recently announced upcoming sequel.
This is the Police is out now on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, Linux, and MAC
Also check out Part One of our EGX Rezzed 2017 podcasts for our interview with Florian Emmerich from THQ Nordic