This is The Police 2 — Game Review
Wow, That Was A Bit Brutal…
Visuals 8/10 - I love the art style used for the game, which is a simplistic art block style with minimal animation. The colors were muted but this gave brighter colors a chance to pop when something needed to be seen easily.
Soundtrack, Voice Overs and Scripting 8/10 - I enjoyed the music and the effort the voice actors put into conveying emotion, brutality and anger. The story got a bit long winded at times, but I found it to be well written and while extremely over the top, it was interesting to watch unfold.
Control/Movements 5/10 - I disliked the turn based combat system. It was too easy to misclick when going from one character to another and getting the one you were just moving killed. Most of the game was a point and click style and the day to day movements of clicking on what or who you wanted were decent, nothing really over the top or difficult.
Difficulty 2/10 - The cutscenes, while well written and voice acted, were excessively long and drawn out, leading to quick boredom if you’re not a story driven person. The day to day management of the police force, the turn based combat and the adding of new assignments every day were tedious and time consuming, bordering on nearly impossible to finish during the day allotted.
Replayability 2/10 - For me, I have no interest in going back to try the game again. The effort for the reward was too low and I personally have no interest in a game that forces me to be frustrated out of the gate every day because of the insane rise in difficulty day to day.
Where can you go where the cops are corrupt, police brutality is the norm, most of the police force is drunk and the other half rarely shows up for work, the sheriff trusts a federal fugitive, VCRs are the newest tech and there’s multiple terroristic crimes going on daily but still have that small town feel? Then head on over to Sharpwood cause you’ll get that and more! (There’s supposedly woodland spirits as well, but I never saw one.)
This Is The Police 2 is the sequel to This Is The Police, which I did not play. The game is a continuation on the events in This Is the Police, though you start out from the point of view of Lilly Reed the new sheriff in town. (The old sheriff was shot in the tutorial.) After some very long cut scenes and a few decision making points, we meet Jack Boyd, the protagonist from the first game. He is now a fugitive and living in Sharpwood under an assumed identity. After another very long cutscene, you get to the main body of the game. But first, let’s start at the beginning of this mess.
The game starts with a basic tutorial, as most games do. The tutorial is a short segment on what happens to get Lilly Reed into the sheriff’s chair and also teaches you the turn based combat system the game uses for some encounters, usually the big raids or bomb threats that happen each day. (Yes, this small town has bomb threats nearly daily. Never mind the crazed citizens who will randomly kill one another or defecate on police cars. I’m not kidding…) The tutorial was great, it went through the turn based combat step by step and walked you through a fairly easy raid scenario. Each character in combat gets two turns, either a move and an action or two moves. Actions can vary from shooting a perp to using a flash bang to arresting the perp. There’s also objects for cover and partial cover.
The problem comes after the tutorial. As I said, the tutorial was fairly easy and straightforward. Then the difficulty level is ratcheted up by 100%, (this is an approximation, it could be easier for others who play turn based games a lot more than me), and the controls are too wonky for the difficulty. If you’re not careful and try to click on another character while clicked on another, the first character will move. And more than likely get shot and bleed to death on the snow cause you can’t get to him because they’re out in the open in line of sight of six crazed criminals. The cover and partial cover are GARBAGE. I had a cop get shot in the foot by a perp while he was under partial cover behind the back end of a police cruiser. The only time cover really worked well for me was when I had a cop behind a house wall. Problem was, then he couldn’t see anything. I tried the same scenario about six times and failed each time because I kept misclicking cops to the wrong positions and getting them shot or moving them on accident by misclicking into line of fire of criminals, who would shoot and kill them. When I gave up, I had to bury three cops. It was a bit sad.
The game bills itself as “running your own police force,” which you do. Kind of. Some days you run the police force, others they run you. Every night, you have to setup the next day’s shift, taking into account cop fatigue bars, talents and days worked. Seems okay, right? Well, then you have the added problem of cops will be in hospital for injuries, will ask to take days off for everything under the sun including going into the woods to make drumsticks from some special tree, (I’m… I’m not kidding), or even showing up completely hammered. Some cops won’t work two days in a row, some will not work with women/ethnicities/slackers/whatever excuse you can think of here, and some will not work alone because “it’s too dangerous.” If this was a real police force, most of these bums would have been fired ages ago. And the managing gets even MORE fun when you start getting calls. And for a small town, Sharpwood has a LOT of crime. Everything from stolen VCRs to angry grooms slamming old town clerks heads into counters so hard, the clerk dies. They even have a drug running gang, the Neckties. Every time you send a squad car out, the loyalty points of the cops needs to add up to the amount needed to complete the call. Which, at first, is fairly simple. As you progress, through, it becomes more difficult, especially as a cop’s loyalty changes depending on decisions you make. If you refuse to let them off for even a day to do something asinine, they will become disloyal. And there’s no real way to tell they’re disloyal unless you somehow figure out that the ones not wearing hats are not loyal to you. One guy even wears his neck tie around his noggin.
So, in my opinion, the day to day running of the police squad is tedious and stressful. On top of everything mentioned above, you need to solve crimes. Which means putting a cop on the case to look for clues, taking them out of the call rotation. I got nowhere fast with the clue finding because I kept putting disloyal cops on clue hunting duty and they couldn’t find their own butts with a map. So I never solved a crime, not even the theft of the brand new VCR. And to make things even BETTER on the day to day, you can bribe people with stuff you take from the evidence room, (one old lady would tell me everything she knew if I gave her a crate of canned peaches. Which I didn’t have, I had taken the pot instead), to get information. Which sometimes comes in handy. Or, you can pay a psychic to help. She was a bit useless. There are other hucksters that come along looking for cash in exchange for their “help” as well. One guy claimed he could talk to the forest spirits and they were telling him they weren’t happy.
A few last things about the day to day management. As you progress through, random people show up, including a mobster from Jack’s past and some British detective. The mobster you have to pay off weekly, which means hustling townsfolk for money. While being hustled yourself. If you don’t get him his money, he’ll go to the Feds. The British detective is there to have a friendly wager; for seven days, you each gather beer tabs, the currency of the department, and whoever gets the most wins. Oh right, I haven’t mentioned beer tabs. Beer tabs are the pull rings on a beer or soda can and you use them to purchase equipment and hire police officers. You get them for completing missions and you lose them for failing missions or getting civilians killed. You always need to end up with more tabs earned than lost or the day is considered a bust. You bust three days in a row, Lilly calls the feds on you and you lose. End of game, bai bai.
All in all, the day to day gameplay is tedious and has way too many balls in the air to consider it enjoyable if you’re not one that is heavily into strategy turn based games. I was frustrated by the end of day four because I could barely stay ahead of the day to day. I asked my fiance to play through some and he got farther than I did, but was running into the same issues of balance. There was just too much that costs too much and way too much going on at once to really make the game feel fun and not like one massive chore just to get to the next long cut scene.
I did enjoy one aspect of the game, which was the story. The cut scenes are very LONG. They give the game a feel of being a movie with game parts in between scenes. I would have been happy with the game if they threw out all the day to day tedium of running the police department and kept it to the story mode decision making. You can choose some aspects of the dialogue while watching the cut scenes. The only real complaint I have about the story is it’s very BRUTAL. I’m not saying it’s blood and guts brutal, it’s mentally brutal. This police station is corrupt beyond any level of corruption I’ve ever seen in any kind of police game or real life police department. The police officers are brutal jerks who pull guns on perps with no real reason, use threats of bodily harm, actual bodily harm, extremely foul and violent language and are basically the biggest jerks you could ever imagine when it comes to a police force.
The males in the game are also fairly nasty to Lilly, the sheriff. In general, they’re nasty to everyone, but they’re particularly rough on Lilly. They will not listen, they ignore her commands and there’s an entire scene where Jack is screaming at Lilly until she breaks down. Now, normally I have a fairly tough skin and things like this I can compartmentalize into “it’s an aspect of the game”, but some of the screaming and shouting and blatant insubordination to the point of hazing gone bad really got under my skin and bothered me. I must have said “wow, that was brutal” a dozen times in the first hour of game play, hence the title of this article. I understand what the game is trying to do, but like with ratcheting up the game play to difficult levels quickly, the escalation and plateau at high levels of brutal behavior and abuse is astronomical and even made me flinch and back away some.
The art of the game is one of my favorite styles. It’s done in an art block minimalist style that has few, if any, facial details, so most of the emotion and storytelling from the game during cutscenes comes from the voice actors. Jack is voiced by John St. John, the voice actor for Duke Nuke’em. There’s no real animation during cutscenes, everything is done in panels, much like a comic book. I liked this aspect of the game because it gave a bit more emotion to the story since the voice actors had to do more to get a point across.
This Is The Police 2 for me was mediocre at best. I was not impressed with the overly difficult game play and turn based combat while balancing a mess of a police department. If I was Jack, I’d have walked away and if I was Lilly, I’d have fired them all and gone to get a drink or ten. The game itself is very well put together artistically and story wise, I found the story compelling but very brutal. The brutality of some of the scenes was a bit much, even for me. The portrayal of police as violent mobsters was a bit disconcerting and would make me cringe, especially when they were being abusive to Lilly. If you’re into the Xcom-style turn based games, then this game is well done for you. If you’re like me and are new to the genre, this isn’t for you at all. The difficulty makes the game feel unplayable and the amount of multitasking is insanely high, making it hard for you to think about your decisions beyond a split second. Which, I get that a lot of police have to make decisions in a split second, it was a bit of a struggle to stay ahead of the day while trying not to kill civilians and your cops.
This Is The Police 2 was given to me by GirlStreamers, Inc. for my unbiased and honest review.
