Highway Police Simulator

I track patch notes the way other people follow sports scores, so when a sim launches with a documented update roadmap already stapled to its store page, that tells me everything. Highway Police Simulator shipped in December 2024 in a state that had critics reaching for the same word across the board: broken. Frame rates routinely collapsed into the teens on high-end hardware, cars launched randomly into the sky, and falling through the map at speed was not an edge case but a near-certainty on longer drives. The developers at Z-Software acknowledged this fast and pushed updates, but the community consensus has been that post-launch patches patched cracks rather than the underlying structure. What makes this frustrating rather than just dismissible is that the bones are more interesting than the genre average. The fictional American Southwest region of Caminora is a genuine open world with both a narrative campaign and randomised free-roam callouts running in parallel. You play as Officer Marshall, a customisable rookie whose background choice actually shifts how NPCs react to you. Your partner Natalia rides along and handles herself competently in shootouts. You return to HQ to file reports, switch to civilian clothes for undercover missions, and escort arrested suspects to holding cells. There is a proper story here, kicked off by a prison bus ambush, which is a rarity in the police sim space. The game also offers both a casual mode and a simulation mode, letting players dial difficulty without locking newcomers out. The trouble is that every one of those systems is undermined at the point of contact. Driving physics are loose to the point of feeling frictionless, and car chases, the centrepiece activity, frequently resolved themselves because pursuit targets got stuck in traffic rather than fleeing. Crime scene investigation involves photographing evidence and interrogating witnesses, which should be satisfying, but cumbersome radial menus and NPC positioning that resets identically between callouts strips the loop of any texture. Gunplay is the worst offender: the shooting model is so poorly tuned that enemies absorb multiple direct hits before reacting, turning what should be tense confrontations into tedious sponge-fights. The AI, both civilian and suspect, exhibits erratic behaviour that ranges from ignoring active sirens to launching police vehicles into orbit on invisible geometry. For the sim-curious who have never touched the genre, this is not your entry point. Police Simulator: Patrol Officers exists in the same lane and, while it lacks the narrative ambition, it actually functions. For the die-hard police sim audience who will tolerate considerable jank in exchange for depth of role, there is a version of Highway Police Simulator worth revisiting after further patching. A S.W.A.T. DLC has since released, adding seven missions around bomb defusal and hostage rescue, which suggests the developers are still actively building on the foundation. Whether the foundation can hold that weight is the open question. As of now, the Steam rating sits at Mostly Negative, and nothing in the update log suggests a transformation is complete. Wait for a sale and check the most recent patch notes before committing.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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