City Patrol: Police

I've seen enough budget driving games to know the warning signs, and City Patrol: Police has most of them ticked within the first hour of play. The pitch is appealing enough on paper: an open-world city split between a structured 15-mission campaign and a free-play sandbox with 80 side quests, all wrapped around a police-car fantasy where you escalate from writing parking tickets to foiling terrorist plots. The fantasy holds together for maybe 90 minutes before the cracks become the whole wall. The structure gives you two distinct modes to sink into. Campaign mode has you working through 15 set-piece missions across highways, country roads, and industrial estates, with difficulty levels and different vehicle classes adding some wrinkle to each run. Free-play is the longer proposition: start as a Rank 1 Officer, complete batches of ten missions, and grind your way up to Captain III across a rank-10 ladder. On paper that is a solid loop. In practice the open world feels underpopulated and the mission variety thins out quickly, leaving the vehicle roster, which ranges from a heavy transporter to a muscle car SUV, as one of the few genuine bright spots. Picking the right car for a cramped downtown run versus a highway chase is a real decision, and it is one of the few places the game asks you to think. The driving physics lean toward action rather than simulation, which would be fine if the action were consistently readable. Traffic density is the stated challenge and the game does throw believable congestion at you, but the handling feedback is mushy enough that threading narrow streets feels more like luck than skill. Wheel or pedal users should not expect any meaningful force-feedback support here. A gamepad is the practical choice, though even then the physics never communicate the weight of a pursuit the way a decent arcade racer does. Community sentiment on Steam sits at a mixed 46% positive across a small review pool, with the recurring complaints pointing at shallow content, a value problem at full price, and a general sense that the game was shipped before it was ready. One piece of history worth knowing: at launch, City Patrol: Police shipped with Valeroa anti-tamper DRM layered on top of Steam. That DRM was removed in May 2020, which is genuinely good news for anyone who had performance concerns tied to it. The game runs on Unreal Engine 4 and the hardware bar is modest, so modern mid-range machines will have no trouble hitting stable frame rates. Solo play only though. There is no multiplayer, no split-screen, no co-op. If your Saturday-night plan involves passing a controller around the couch for cop-car chaos, this will disappoint immediately. For the specific player who finds budget open-world police games charming on their own merits, there is a thin but real novelty here, particularly in the rank progression and the vehicle selection logic. Everyone else should wait for a steep discount or look at the more fully realised police driving options the genre has produced since 2018. City Patrol: Police is a decent concept roughed in but never finished.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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