Publisher:THQ NordicDeveloper:Weappy StudioPlatforms:PC/macOS, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo SwitchGenre:Turn-based Strategy, AdventureRelease date:July 2018
The first This Is the Police was well liked by players for its turn-based gameplay and police-centred story. The second game in the series came out towards the end of July, and it was through this instalment that I discovered the series. Its 3 GB size initially made me suspicious about how much content it could contain. After all, developers have long since accustomed us to enormous games that fill our hard drives. But as I played, I discovered an entire world of variety packed into that small space.
Let us make this clear at the outset: This Is the Police 2 is not an action game or a shooter. It is built around management, planning and strategy. Younger players shouldn’t let the title convince them they will be fighting crime and running from one shootout to the next. The game concentrates more on administration, and demands a good ability to read English while doing so. Are there combat and raid missions? Of course, but they are only a small part of the variety on offer.
The game takes place in a town called Sharpwood. Players of the first game will recognise some characters; for those beginning with the second game, as I did, everyone is new. Following the previous chief’s tragic death, Sharpwood has a new police chief: a young woman. An academy graduate named Lilly Reed, she struggles to do her job as a woman in Sharpwood’s provincial atmosphere. Sexism among the officers and Lilly’s lack of experience undermine their respect for her, and running the station becomes an impossible task. At just this moment, the police raid a rented shack belonging to Warren Nash, a man who has recently moved to town, and discover kilos of drugs. They bring him to the station and put him in a cell. Lilly meets him there and realises that Warren Nash is actually Jack Boyd, an extremely experienced former police chief. Jack Boyd is, in fact, wanted by the FBI. After retiring, he disappeared with something like half a million dollars. The ensuing investigation alleged that he had abused his position and cooperated with criminal organisations and the mafia. To escape all that turmoil, Jack changed his name and settled in Sharpwood. That is where his path crosses Lilly’s. When Jack solves one of her murder cases on the spot, Lilly decides that his experience could help her out of the helpless, chaotic situation she is in and appoints him to a covert position in the station. After this cinematic sequence, we begin running the station as Jack.
An elaborate management console awaits us in This Is the Police 2. From the officers’ loyalty to you to the food they eat each day, everything is your responsibility. You have to attend carefully to everything, from whom they work with on calls to their drinking problems. For example, some officers refuse to go on duty with a woman, some won’t work with lower-ranking officers, and some are so lazy that they refuse assignments before their shift has even ended. Some drink too much at night and have accidents while on duty. Others fail to turn up for work without explanation. Some ask for time off to read a book or repair their porch. You must consider every case carefully and make the right decisions. Those decisions shape the whole course of the game. Most of the time you won’t have enough officers for every call, so you need to read each report carefully before deciding whom to send. Civilians killed or criminals escaping because of calls you miss come back as negative points at the end of the day.
So, we run the station, earn our officers’ respect, respond to calls and develop their simple skill trees properly. Is that all? No. We also have to pay $20,000 a week in bribes to a shady man who knows Jack Boyd is living in Sharpwood, so that he won’t report us to the FBI. To find that money, we have to send officers to help townspeople as well as fight crime. A shopkeeper who has other business to attend to might need an intelligent, persuasive officer to mind the store, for example, while an elderly woodcutter might need two strong officers to help him. These assignments bring back items and money. In addition to the daily calls with time limits, there are murder investigations to which you must assign officers. Using clues and witness statements, you develop several possible suspect profiles, identify the real culprit, put the evidence together, make an arrest and send the suspect to court. If you occasionally arrest the wrong person, a bribe to the jury can sweep that mistake under the carpet.
Our work doesn’t end there. Every few days or weeks, a major crime in town opens up an operation mission. Here the game becomes turn-based, and you assign officers according to their abilities and the weapons they carry, then neutralise suspects, defuse a bomb or evacuate civilians within a set number of turns. There is a small problem with the game here. Although you are controlling ordinary police officers, going straight into a firefight inevitably results in injuries or deaths. That pushes you towards completing operations stealthily. In effect, you end up conducting special-forces operations with ordinary cops. Unfortunately, they have not got the balance right in these turn-based missions. You have to remain hidden and undetected or the operation becomes much harder. And if you have mismanaged your officers and lost their respect, they will ignore your orders during these operations, attack directly and get injured or killed.
Now for another dead end awaiting you. Lilly releases you from the cell and assigns you a purpose: do the job of chief that she cannot manage herself, straighten out the station and bring peace to the town. But calls you miss and operations you fail produce negative points during the day. If these outweigh your positive points, you finish with a score of zero. End three days in a row with a negative result at any point, and Lilly decides you cannot do the job, calls the damn feds and the game ends. Fail to find the weekly twenty thousand dollars for the man you are paying not to report you, and those same damn feds turn up at your door: game over. A superior Lilly admires, a retired military commander, arrives at the station, claims he can run it better than you and challenges you to a contest. Lose to him, and that is game over too. In short, there is no room for mistakes here.
So what advantage do you have? Although the game’s structure would be ideally suited to a sandbox, it wasn’t designed that way. Every time you lose and start again, the same assignments arrive on the same days. The game repeats itself. They have tied a structure that would have worked much better with random events to a fixed calendar. As you play and lose repeatedly, you therefore learn which calls are fake and which are important and earn points. If you are willing to be a bad person open to corruption, the story and missions will also rub your nose in just how far bribery and corruption can go.
All in all, an enormous range of activities awaits you in a surprisingly small package. If you are interested in management games and like a challenge, This Is the Police 2 is very much for you.
WHY AM I HERE, LILLY?