I’ve arrested someone who did not deserve it. The chump was carrying counterfeit jewellry and I lazily slapped on the cuffs without reading my police handbook. I’m about to get that book thrown at me. When I sit at my desk at the end of a shift in cop sim The Precinct, I will get a chunk of XP deducted from my earnings for detaining this dude for a minor infraction. When The Precinct’s action ramps up and it transforms into a top-down blaster, it becomes ponderous and clunky, but its quieter moments of police pretending encourage a strict dedication to the role of petty rules enforcer. It’s a game of quibbles and quirks, imperfect in many ways, but there’s a sense of commitment underneath it all that I can respect. Even if I don’t respect the badge itself.
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The easiest way to explain this arrest ’em up is to describe it as “Grand Theft Auto in reverse”. You play a rookie cop in the fictional US city of Averno in 1983. You drive around in your patrol car, partner at your side, and deal with any crimes you spot happening on the streets. You’ll break up drunken brawls, interrupt alleyway muggings, and chase down drunk drivers. But a big component is that you’re not (just) beating thugs up or gunning bank robbers down – you’re arresting them and doing mild paperwork too. Every apprehended criminal has to be properly processed, their crimes listed accurately, and their heads pushed into the rear seat of a cop car with firm action movie closure.
Each day you choose from a bunch of shift patterns in the station. Maybe today you’ll just look for parking violations around the station. Or go to the other island of the city to patrol the highways for speeding offences. There are dogged day shifts and anti-social night shifts, and the ability to customise a shift’s location and focus to your liking.
Or you can stick mostly to story-driven shifts, in which you’ll go after gang members, working your way up a small ladder of goons and underbosses until you land enough evidence (in the form of dropped weapons and confiscated contraband) to take down the capo dei capi of that specific gang. This basically trains the player to profile certain pedestrians (anyone with dyed hair is a potential member of the Jawheads, anyone wearing a snake t-shirt is a potential Crimson Serpent). There are ordinary decent criminals everywhere, but you can quickly get tunnel vision on these particular NPC types. An interesting side effect reflective of an aspect of real policing I don’t have the time or energy to unpack here.
Those story missions compose the central chunks in a pastiche soup of police story tropes and typical hardened cop drama characters. Your hero is the son of a cop killed in the line of duty (hi there, Rush Hour) with the suspiciously nice chief telling our boy how proud dad would be. The writing doesn’t get more imaginative out on the streets. While GTA games are famous for having thousands of unique snippets of overheard conversations from passing NPCs, nearly every citizen of Averno seems to talk exclusively in tired lines from popular culture, from “eat my shorts” to “you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry”. The concept of the game – Grand Theft Not-on-my-watch – feels fresh, but the actual dialogue and storytelling is trite in a way that feels wasteful. Don’t expect The Wire is what I’m saying.
The game is best when it frees you to walk around in the sandbox and pretend to be on an everyday beat. On my first proper shift I arrested a car thief, three muggers, a burglar, a manslaughter suspect, and that one poor idiot who just happened to be carrying a counterfeit necklace who I put in cuffs too eagerly.
Averno City is awash with ne’er do wells in the same comically criminalistic manner of Gotham. You cannot walk 50 metres without spotting a badness, and this leads to a lot of funny incidents. You chase a murder suspect, only for a bystanding mugger to panic at the sight of a cop running toward him, and start hitting you with his crowbar. Once, I chased a perp down into a subway station and tackled her rag-dollishly onto the rail line, where we were both soon flattened by the incoming northbound.
Some of its most involving simulation is in the moments when you don’t act. When you see a burglar swaggering away with a hi-fi stereo and just let him walk on because, hey, you’re busy arresting a drug dealer. Or when you overtake and ignore a driver who throws trash out his window right in front of you, just because your shift is over and it’s not your problem. In these nuggets lie the feeling of being a work-a-day no-good beat cop. Why answer the radio call about a robbery when it’s a whole 200 metres outside your patrol zone? That’s someone else’s problem, chief.
That this feeling of cop-ness arises organically is promising. Although it’s easily subsumed when the game takes a U-turn into unimaginative cover shooting with a stick-to-walls button that is often unresponsive and an aiming reticule that feels brainless. There are big numbers of perps, but you are barely encouraged to move or flank enemies. It’s just a whack-a-mole game of target practice. Ammo is restocked at crates near the combat zone, and these summon a superfluous radial wheel pop-up, artificially halting the flow of combat.
In fact, let’s talk about the radial wheel. A lot of the policey actions you take are done via the same sort of context-sensitive command wheel that hovers around your head and sometimes requires multiple dips into nested categories of action. When you’ve apprehended a crook, you click on “Resolve” to bring up a selection of options like “Arrest” or “Let Go”. One menu you’ll often use to tick off crimes committed by the person involves repeated dives down the radial rabbithole (Resolve > Additional Offences > On-Foot Offences > Assault).
It makes the game feel less like GTA in reverse and more like The Sims if you followed a cop dad to work. I’m not a fan of the ubiquitous slow-mo radial wheel even when it is used in shooters to lessen the pain of weapon selection. You retain choice, sure, but at the expense of flow as the player is confronted with a cluttered disc of symbols in the middle of fight. Here I find it almost as cumbersome. You can tweak an option so the game automatically ticks off criminal offences, but this only removes any actual thought from every stop and search. To be honest, I’d rather just fill out a big form full of tickboxes when I get back to the station.
Other minor annoyances stack up. I had to play through the opening of the game twice because it swallowed my save file whole. Both AI citizens and your police partner can act stupid or weird, although this is often a source of unintentional comedy. My fellow patrol officer once went fully invisible for a few minutes. And later that day I was told I’d lost a suspect even after handing him directly to the police station front desk. One handcuffed citizen who fell into the water by the docks climbed back out using a ladder using only his feet, a show of extreme circus skill for which I almost uncuffed and set him loose in reward. Sadly, I was unable to interact with him after the dip.
If bugs don’t distract you, the game’s many warning notices might. As you may expect from a cop game, it wants you to stick to your role of upstanding badge bearer, yet it does this even as it gives you all the violent freedom of a GTA clown. Sure, you can kill random civilians or murder suspects in cold blood for minor littering offences. But do so and you’ll be greeted with a variety of red-screening warning messages and an instafail shutdown of your dastardly acts. “Do not injure civilians!” it barks. “Use appropriate force at all times!” and “Do not shoot!” and “Suspect must not be killed!”. Even if you aren’t slapped with a game over, you are often scolded for lesser infractions. “That’s not my current objective” if you talk to someone out of turn, or “Wait for Kelly!” if you drive off without your partner.
All these orders, game-ending or otherwise, reinforce the designer’s intentions. The player must be good cop, not bad cop. I understand the reasoning for such commands, it’s a solution to the question: “what if the player isn’t doing what we want?” But it tastes overwhelmingly of “return to the mission area”, the blunt instrument of a failstate wielded like a baton. More interesting is the big whack of XP that gets deducted at the end of your shift for “poor conduct” if you do things wrong, like arrest someone for the wrong offence (oops) or search an innocent pedestrian without running a proper ID check. Either way, the designers have made a GTA-esque open world, but they want you to inhabit it in a (mostly) orderly fashion. The game polices you as much as you police the game.
So as far as cop ’em ups go, it fits somewhere between the grey dispatch tales of This Is The Police and the boots-on-the-ground patrolling of Police Simulator: Patrol Officers. As much as the comparison isn’t fair, I also find myself thinking of it alongside Shadows Of Doubt, the recent open world detective sim. One of these games leans into reality, and tries to disguise its inherent silliness with gritty crime writing and big messages that say “don’t do that!” while the other approaches crime fighting as an emergent and daft misadventure, with barely any thought put into a linear or traditional narrative at all. Both are buggy, scrappy, repetitious, and characterful in their own way. Personally, I prefer the one that doesn’t do things so strictly by the book. But if you’d rather wear a uniform and follow the rules, The Precinct will keep you in line.
