This Is the Police

This Is the Police is an enjoyable but flawed management sim that gives you a taste of what it's like to be the chief of police.

This Is The Police looks and sounds gorgeous, but becomes dull and repetitive after the first couple of hours.

This is the Police is far too long for the amount of content it provides. Only true believers will make it within shouting distance of the ending

It’s a bit of a mixed bag. If you’re happy to sit idly waiting for balloons of jobs to pop up, and take each day as slowly as it comes, then you’ll probably get a lot more out of this tale of corruption and downfalls than I did. But if you’re interested in deeper systems and micromanaging your officers, forget it, it’s Chinatown.

This is the Police presents situations that aren’t deep enough to invoke social commentary, yet it still takes the opportunity to arbitrarily throw them out in the open. It’s missing key storytelling elements that allow for that kind of messaging, and in the mundane yet slur-sprinkled missions those ideas fall apart. However with its interesting gameplay mechanics, pretty packaging, and plans for a sandbox mode it has a lot of future promise which I hope they deliver on.

An interesting genre mash-up that offers noir adventure and city management in bite-sized chunks. An expertly crafted atmosphere can't hide some rigid storytelling and shallow systems, but fans of cop movies and resource management should give this one a go.

This Is The Police asks players to step into a career that's already on the rocks, in a city beyond saving, and then demands that you try and make things right regardless. It's a mature, compelling experience that combines elements of strategy, resource management and text adventure games, while telling a gripping story of corruption and withered hope - albeit with some muddled attempts to deal with real world issues. The meat of the game is solid, if extremely repetitious after some hours, so we can't help but feel if it was a shorter, more tightly focused game with a bit more variety, it would have felt more satisfying overall. As it stands there's hours of gameplay here for any budding cop, it just outstays its welcome a little.

A dangerous topic, handled poorly and resulting in a truly awful game. The gameplay has nothing to do with the story, but worse the gameplay doesn’t care if you play it. Just wait out a timer.

This is the Police is a dark gritty cop noire game, with real-world moral choices. By having this game on the Nintendo Switch makes it an ideal game to grab and lose some hours into it away from a TV screen. Highly recommend it!

This is the Police is basically a visual novel disguised as a strategy videogame. Apart from a lack of any depth in its mechanics, choices don't really matter, as almost everything happens no matter what you do. The story section is a lot better, and the audio-visuals even more so, but these won't be enough to satisfy strategy enthusiasts.