Anyone who has read previous reviews of mine or has seen the types of games that I usually play, knows that I don’t take very well to games that involve aspects of management. I find that I get overwhelmed and frustrated at my innate inability to multi-task. Few games that I’ve played in this vein have had the ability to keep me interested. This is the Police is one of those few games. When the Kickstarter campaign was launched for this title, I remember thinking that it sounded a little corny and a little unrealistic, and, quite honestly, I didn’t expect to hear all that much about it after that. I was wrong, and when This is the Police was released and met with immediate praise. I had to check it out for myself, because I still remained a bit skeptical, for whatever reason.
When I started up the game for the first time, I was immediately struck by how completely saturated it was in style. The story takes place in the mid ‘80’s. You take on the role of Jack Boyd, the police chief of the fictional city of Freeburg. Jack feels like a real person. The character development in this game is astoundingly deep. You find out, through little vignettes in a very minimalistic art style and some great voice acting by the likes of Jon St. John of Duke Nukem fame, that Jack has led the stereotypically troubled life of a police officer. His wife left him. He’s got an unhealthy dependency on drugs and alcohol. He works in a town where he’s surrounded by corruption. He’s being forced out of his position as chief at the end of a 180-day period where the mayor has told him to just do his job quietly, without rocking the boat. But he’s also got pressure to try and build up a savings for retirement within those 180 days, and the temptation of taking money from the very powerful mafia kingpin that operates in his backyard in order to help with that, as well as “play ball” with the powers that be.
You can choose to play how you like. You can take the morally ambiguous route and accept bribes, look the other way when the mafia is doing something, and kowtow to the demands of City Hall, no matter how mind-numbingly ridiculous they might be. Or, you can go the high road, and tell them all to piss off as you carve your own legacy of righteousness through the city of Freeburg on your path to retirement.
If you choose to ignore those pressures, as I did on my first playthrough, you’re going to find that you’re fighting an uphill battle as City Hall takes away resources and denies requests for funding and assistance. You’ll also find that the mafia doesn’t like to be messed with and that they have the resources to make your life a living hell if you decide to take them on.
This is the Police does a very good job of slowly piling on the mounting responsibilities of being a police chief. You will start with being given an understanding of managing the two shifts of officers and detectives you have on your payroll, assigning them to calls for service as they come in through each day of work, trying your best to keep officers available as more and more calls of various (sometimes hilarious) crimes come through your dispatch center. On top of this, you’ll have to deal with certain officers who are unreliable for various reasons. Alcoholism, laziness, and just a general unreliability are examples of some of the traits you’ll encounter in your employees. They’ll call in sick, or suddenly quit for various reasons. You’ll also have to negotiate with City Hall to give you more money, more training, more positions to fill out your ever-increasing needs for more help in tackling the problems thrown at you from every angle by the city and its citizens.
The game feels wonderful. As you look over a scale model of your city and dispatch your officers on their calls, you are able to choose from your personal collection of albums, which consists of mostly jazz music, that serves as a perfect soundtrack for the game’s already heavy noir influences. You are started off with about five different albums to choose from, but after a few days, your catalog arrives, which allows you to add music to your library. Each song is accompanied by a brief review. One of my favorites was this: “If Zeus, Buddha, and Jesus wrote a song together, it would sound like this.” Obviously, I spent the (in-game) money on that song. As the day progresses, the sun will shine through the window of your office onto your map, or rain will roll through and streaks will darken the view, then your light will flicker on as the day turns to evening. Finally, as you close up shop for the day, your venetian blinds will rattle down.
Each day, you’re met with the day’s headlines from various local papers that will usually give you an indication of what’s to come either that day or somewhere down the line. Then you’ll head in to work and be given another little montage of the current events that are going on with your personal life and the story that is evolving around you.
The beautiful thing about This is the Police is that it manages to be a really well-done management-style game, while at the same time presenting you with a very interesting and complex story that is very reactive to the choices that you make through your day-to-day gameplay.
The only other game that I’ve ever played that I could compare the choice-driven moral aspects of this game to is Papers, Please. In both games, you are given a somewhat straight-forward set of job responsibilities, but then the game allows you the ability to purposely fail at those tasks, in order to meet some other, more complex goal. There is never a “right” choice, as it seems that choosing the morally correct choice usually leads to making a sacrifice somewhere else, while making the morally ambiguous choice might lead to a direct or immediate benefit, but with the distinct chance that the repercussions may catch up to you at a later time. This makes for a very fascinating game as you are constantly asking yourself what sacrifices you are willing to make in order to create the best possible outcome for your character. It also lends itself to inviting multiple playthroughs, as I can see how certain choices, I made early on in This is the Police would make for vastly different experiences if I’d have chosen differently.
This is the Police is, in my opinion, a must-play. It is just one of those little gems that comes along all-too-rarely that you’d be doing yourself a disservice to not experience, at least once. The mix of story, solid and enjoyable gameplay, great writing and voice-acting (for the most part), and a thick, juicy atmosphere that really sucks you in and makes you feel the part, is what sets this game apart from others that may, on the surface, end up in the same category, but will not, for the most part, offer the same depth and level of quality and detail as is offered here.
