This Is the Police

I put about eighteen hours into This Is the Police, and the first six of them are genuinely some of the most atmospheric time I have spent with a management title. You are Jack Boyd, a 60-year-old chief being squeezed out of the Freeburg Police Department by a corrupt mayor, and you have 180 in-game days to scrape together half a million dollars before the door hits you. The tension that creates is real. Every incoming call is a resource-allocation puzzle: do you send your two best officers to the armed robbery and leave the domestic disturbance to rookies, or do you split the squad and risk both going sideways? Triage those decisions wrong and officers get hurt, your budget gets docked, and your retirement fund stays stubbornly short. The systems underneath that triage are more layered than the indie price tag suggests. Officers have morale and political leanings - and once Freeburg's factional politics heat up, sending a squad of ideologically opposed cops to the same scene degrades unit cohesion and produces worse outcomes. You can designate an informant to surface a colleague's allegiances, but that officer may end up dead and your pay docked as a consequence. Detectives run parallel investigation tracks, collecting photographs and witness statements that you have to arrange into a timeline to make the arrest stick. The endgame escalates further, adding tactical unit-placement for a direct assault on a political rival. On paper, that is a tidy progression from reactive dispatch sim to something approaching a light tactics layer. In practice it lands unevenly, because the game's 180-day structure is about forty days too long for the ideas it has. Repetition is the honest criticism here and it is well-earned. Around the day-90 mark, the dispatch loop loses friction. Officers become numbers rather than people, calls sort themselves into low-medium-high buckets on autopilot, and you find a reliable rhythm that removes the anxiety that made early play interesting. The story, voiced by Jon St. John in a gravel-and-cigarettes register that suits Boyd perfectly, is the main reason to push through the drag. The newspaper-panel cutscene style is restrained and effective, and Boyd's narration carries genuine noir weight. But critics and players alike noticed that the narrative ambitions - corruption, race politics, mafia entanglement - are introduced and then left mostly unexamined. The game gestures at serious themes without the mechanical depth to make those gestures land. That gap between what the story implies and what the gameplay actually models is the central disappointment. For strategy-adjacent players who primarily want an atmospheric, story-driven experience with some resource-management teeth, This Is the Police is a reasonable single-playthrough proposition at the right price. Replay value is limited because each day runs on a fixed schedule rather than any procedural logic, so a second run would just be a faster first run. There is a sequel and a spin-off (Rebel Cops) if the formula clicks for you. No mod ecosystem to speak of, no sandbox mode that materialised despite early promises, and no multiplayer of any kind - this is a solo, linear, story-first product with strategy wrapping.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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