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The little review – This Is The Police

Our beloved machines are awash in management games. It's well known, the first games of this genre have appeared on our computers for a long time now, Simcity opening the voice and democratizing this very unique and time-consuming style of play. The years have passed and now, we find management games of all kinds, whether in the world of football with the Football Manager, the hospital universe with Two Point Hospital, passing through the management of our city with City Skyline where much of our military power with the Total War saga. A string of games which have therefore managed to acquire a solid base of followers, but which have often struggled to reach new players, whether by the complexity of their game, their gameplay redundancy or by the limited replayability of some. And precisely, today, we are going to talk about a game that tries to renew the genre by using a very particular recipe: narration.

You are reading episode 17 of La P'tite Critique, and today we are going to talk about This Is The Police.

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What is This Is The Police?

This Is The Police is a management game developed by independent studio Weappy, released in 2016 and available on PC, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. You will then play Jack Boyd, chief of police of the imaginary city of Freebud, six months from his well-deserved retirement. Living his days to the rhythm of the glasses of whiskey he downs, your objective will be to accumulate a substantial sum of money to ensure a comfortable end of life and for that, you will have to efficiently run the police station that you have in your head. From the intervention of a police officer for an armed robbery to the recruitment of investigators to dismantle a drug cartel, This Is The Police immerses you in a corrupt city where you too will be confronted with this temptation of money easy, but be careful, because your actions will not be without consequences.

Manage and manage our dear police officers.

This Is The Police thus mixes two very particular types of genre. On the one hand, you have management, because yes, the game asks you to manage your police station by ensuring that your staff are not too tired to be able to be effective in the field in order to arrest the thugs which are rampant in Freebud, but not only. Sometimes some calls for help will be false alarms or even hoaxes, draining your troops of energy and wasting your available manpower for the field, so reading and taking the time to think about sending your units is more than crucial, because a series of bad interventions will undoubtedly lead you to a frustrating Game Over. At the same time as the interventions, the investigations are then added, requiring much more time to be resolved and forcing you to recruit investigators in order to solve a case which can be spread over several Ingame days. In short, the gameplay of the game is well filled and will push you to make difficult decisions by putting aside certain interventions and investigations to curry favor with the Mayor and increase the monetary envelope given to you each week.

Six months to get it all.

On the other side, you have the narration of the game, because yes, you will embody Jack Boyd from A to Z, accompanying him in his last six months of career while the latter juggles between the demands of the Town Hall which despairs of seeing the town drowned in corruption, the mafia pressuring your character to turn a blind eye to their business, and Jack urging him to leave with enough money to be safe until the end of his days. To do this, dialogues, encounters and difficult choices will be offered to you in order to find a good balance and reach the end of the game without a hitch. And it has to be said, studio Weappy did a great job of writing and going to great lengths to bring their characters to life. Quickly we hang on and we live to the rhythm of the endless days accompanied by the Jazzy music of the chief of police, trying to guide him as best we can through the sharp fangs of the mafia, the irresistible call of corruption and easy money. The story is poignant, accompanied by more than good dubbing because This Is The Police is, before being a management game, a game with a pleasant story.

Management sacrificed at the cost of storytelling.

If This Is The Police has an interesting story, the game's biggest problem is the Management side. If during the first hours of play, managing your police units, the intervention of your men and solving the investigations proves to be demanding, weariness can very quickly set in after a few hours, in particular because of frustration obvious linked to your police officers who can lose their lives for a yes or a no, the interventions that follow one another and resemble each other, to such an extent that you no longer pay attention to the reasons for the calls as well as certain tasks that are impossible to complete because of your staff too small. These points can lead you to a frustrating Game Over and once you start the game again... you absolutely have to redo everything, because there is no random intervention or large numbers, which impacts the replayability of the title too much. .

Like all games, This Is The Police is not a perfect game. Very quickly boring because of its rather empty management side after several hours of play, it is nonetheless very well thought out thanks to its narration which forces us to suffer and continue, at all costs, to move forward in order to to know the outcome of the police chief's story. Obtainable for a few euros, This Is The Police is still an enjoyable game just waiting to be played and if you like management and engaging stories, I strongly advise you to get it.

Required configuration :

Minimum configuration:

Operating system: Windows XP 32
Processor: Dual Core CPU
RAM: 2 GB
Hard disk: 5 GB of available disk space.
Graphics card: Geforce 7800, AMD HD 4600, Intel HD3000 or similar
DirectX®: Version 9.0
Sound: DirectX Compatible

Recommended configuration:

Operating System: Windows 10
Processor: Quad Core CPU
RAM: 4 GB
Hard disk: 5 GB of available disk space.
Graphics card: GeForce 560 or higher, AMD Radeon HD 5800 or higher.
DirectX®: Version 11
Sound: DirectX Compatible

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