Stuck between a rock and a hardplace.
Developer: Weappy Studio
Price: $14.99
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with PC copy for review
Jack Boyd; down and out Police Chief for the crumbling city of Freeburg has had better times. Scandal has left his career in shambles and he’s down to his last 180 days on the job. Its up to you to put everything right, or give up on his legacy and make some quick cash to retire with instead.
With every crooked government official and gangster in the city trying you leverage you neatly into their pocket, This Is The Police has you striving to accommodate everyone and in turn failing them all.
The heart of the game is its adventure genre leanings. As each day passes you find out more about Jack Boyd’s life through dark and minimalistic comic-strip vignettes and watch as the strings begin to pull at our character’s life, home, ethics and sense of duty.
At times you will be faced with decisions to alter the course of your campaign, a theme present in all facets of This Is The Police. Whether to help a friend or leave him to his fate to protect your own is a powerful moment, and there are a number of them throughout the campaign. The artstyle of these segments are eye-catching in their simplisticity. Shapes and colours make out the forms and setting for each comic panel. Faces are absent, with all the characterisation stemming from their posture, colour, or Jack’s inner monologue. Clever visual style, in turn with the powerful performance of Jack Boyd by Jon St. John (voice of the iconic Duke Nukem), make the narrative elements feel authentic and polished with just enough Film Noir to be edgy and not a parody of itself.
In essence, This Is The Police is a management game with a sprinkling of real time strategy. Your job is to use your rotating shifts of officers and detectives to fight crime and solve cases across Freeburg. As emergencies arise you need to decide who to send and how many. The severity of the callout could require more officers or even SWAT/Paddy Wagon escort. Occasionally you will have to make choices on how to deal with a certain crime, and depending on your course of action, can lead to simply losing the offender, to having your officers killed in the line of duty. Your success rate largely relies on the professionalism stat of the officer taking the call; leading you to have to make critical staffing choices often.
Your detectives get busy investigating crimes and putting the hurt on gangs. It really just boils down to dedicating your detective’s time to the case until they pop out some scenes you need to put in the correct order. While it is a simple system, there is an innate sense of satisfaction when you take down the leader of an organised crime syndicate.
Not only do you have to deal with taking down bad guys, but before long you will be fielding requests from the criminal elite. Again, whittling down your pool of active officers for a period of time, however injecting some much needed cash.
City Hall is an omnipresent entity that is watching your every move that also makes demands of your workforce. Often these requests are contrary to efficiency or even common decency, ignoring them will soon have you having to fire from your pool of officers leaving you in the lurch while criminals run rampant. It is a game of checks and balances. Leaning too heavily on one element will have you paying the price with another.
A touch I love, that I feel more games should start introducing is the record collection. At the beginning of every day you choose a track of music from your selection of vinyl records. Ranging from soft classical to big band jazz, the music is delightfully varied and a fantastic match to the office environment you command from.
I have tried to keep things fairly positive until this point. There are a lot of clever, quirky and impactful moments on offer, but when the entire product is mixed together, it comes out an ugly misshapen conglomerate of awkward contrast.
First of all is the pacing. Understandably this is primarily an adventure title and so the elegant storytelling takes centre-stage; it is just brutally slow. A cutscene can run over the 5 minute mark as Jack Boyd’s self-indulgent soliloquies spread languishing across 2 or 3 frames of minimalistic artwork. Just when the action starts heating up on the management-side, you have to set that aside and gear down to the artful and verbose interludes.
After that, comes the rather frustrating lack of information when it comes to the strategy of This Is The Police. Officers being killed thanks to RNG (random number generator) is a bit of a buzzkill when there is very little to base your decisions on. There are no probabilities on offer and you will find yourself simply deciding whether to break down a door, or go in through a window. Meaningless and opaque decisions have a profound impact on gameplay, leaving a salty aftertaste when you unknowingly took the wrong path.
Finally, This Is The Police, is an allegorical representation of police in the USA, irrespective of what the developers intended. This comes with the responsibility of handling sensitive issues with deft touches and sense of tact. Instead they’ve gone for a very heavy-handed approach. In the same session of gameplay you can have a officer dousing a stripper cat-fight with ice water, someone calling in sick because it’s their dog’s birthday, to City Hall declaring all black officers must be fired due to racial tension; just WOW!
While making difficult decisions is definitely an integral part of the experience, the awfully ignorant way Weappy Studio have approached the topics of gender, race and other lodestones of current civil hostilities is absolutely deplorable.
The Final Word
A beautifully dark tale woven around an adequate management game. The pacing is too slow, topics addresses are handled awkwardly and as much as I wanted to love this game for its writing and style, every new day of police work was a struggle.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 2.5 out of 5 – Mediocre
