izigame.me

TL:DR

Calls are small scale. Animations are slow, frustrating. Dialogue and calls are repetitive and at times uninteresting. The premise of turning police work into a game with strict rules immediately defeats several facets of realism. It is in early access, and they appear to be adding more and fixing bugs, but it's not enough yet. I hope to one day change this review to a thumbs up.

Further depth required

I like the game and I think that it has a good foundation. However, 20 hours in I feel like I've seen everything there is to see in the game. For what's supposed to be a (somewhat) open world with random event generation, it is incredibly repetitive. I think this is a case of design priority. It's easy to design cool looking assets (cars, people, the city), but the challenge of bringing this game to life is a more invisible design that the developers need to work on. This makes sense to prioritize visible design to promote game purchases, but it feels like a facade when you get past the obvious stuff. I would be much less critical of this game if I didn't think it were trying to go for a more all-encompassing look at police work. It's called Police Simulator: Patrol Officers. When I read that, I expect a bit more than exclusively traffic collisions, parking tickets, traffic stops, and one of two callouts for crimes involving violence. Add on to that the $25 price tag, and I think my criticisms are valid.

Lacking in scale

I think the most limiting aspect of the game so far is the lack of large-scale calls. What I mean is that every call/activity in the game is oriented towards one single officer (the player) and possibly a friend (if playing multiplayer). This means that there's typically only one suspect to deal with (maybe two for a drug deal or an accident w/ multiple DUI's). It feels as though you are the only officer in the entire city, meaning that there's (so far) no room for large scale calls like riots, crime scenes to secure, pursuits, surveillance, etc. Law enforcement is in no way a solitary activity, so the concept that you can't even call for backup or that you're the sole officer in the city is nonsensical. (Is there ever a time in which an assault call with 3 injured, as is a common callout in this game, would justify a response and area search by only a single officer?) Furthermore, the game gives you a gun, but there is absolutely no situation in which you can/should use it, begging the question of why they even allow you to pull it out of your holster. (I understand that it may be added in the future, but why give us access to a gun if it is useless in terms of the available calls and activities.) This hilarious review points out the only thing you can currently use your gun for.

Polish and refinement necessary

There's a particularly nasty tendency in this game for character animations and speech to be linear, predictable, unskippable, slow, and clunky. When speaking with a person, there are delays after selecting options to then access the menu again, meaning that if you choose an option that will play a long animation/speech, you're suddenly stuck for 5-15 sec waiting for the animation+dialogue to finish. If there's a wallet theft in front of you (as there often are since apparently these idiots steal wallets with a police officer 10 ft away from them) you have to sit there waiting for the clunky dialogue to finish before you can run after them. It locks you into the animations, which is incredibly annoying. The animations should be both faster, and allow you to cancel them such that you're (realistically) able to have a faster reaction time. This would be an essential addition if they ever (as they are planning to do...?) add lethal force as a component to the game. If a suspect decides to open fire while you're asking for someone's ID, in the current game state, you have to wait for the 'giving back ID' animation to play (feels like about 4-5 seconds) before you could even start to draw your weapon. This game is operating as if nothing would be urgent enough to do anything but move slowly, methodically, and with little purpose. That's not very realistic, especially for American police ("Join the police force of this fictitious American city..."), whose training emphasizes head-on-a-swivel preparedness to use force defending themselves and/or others when necessary.

Unfortunately, policing is not cut and dry

Lastly, as is the case in making anything a game, the conditions for success in this game are defined, linear, rigid, and unforgiving. Unfortunately, that is an incredibly difficult rule set to apply to policing/law enforcement, as most things are never black and white. The game applies rigid rules to what is actually interpretation for the player. When you're searching for a wanted suspect, due to the limited character models in the game, there are often multiple people on the same block who roughly match the picture/description. If you detain a person who looks similar, but isn't the wanted person, you are punished for even detaining them. The game is assuming that the wanted person is unique, but there are countless people (as in real life) that look similar or would match a partial description.

Bugs

None of this is to mention the plethora of bugs. A few glaring examples:
Handcuffs aren't returned, meaning you may be stuck unable to arrest anyone. This is especially frustrating on foot patrols as there is no cruiser to refill your handcuffs (which still doesn't work sometimes).
AI traffic is nonsensical. They consistently:
-'pull over' in the middle of the road
-fail to yield correctly to lights and sirens
-don't know how avoid accidents (this is still true, even with the recent traffic update)
-can't drive around your cruiser when it's parked in the road. Even if your cruiser is simply parked too far from the curb, that lane of traffic will back up for miles.
GPS navigation is next to useless, recommending long routes following strict traffic rules (with lights+sirens, why would you drive 1 mile around a block to avoid driving 100 feet down the wrong way?), often pushing you into a district you're forbidden from. Very helpful getting fired for following the directions (why would you be fired for driving a block outside your assignment?).
Driving mechanics are clunky. On keyboard, pressing W to go forward means that for the first couple seconds, you are burning out with max revs and zero grip. Braking is non-ABS, which means you lose all grip when braking, making simultaneous turning impossible. Blinker's are not automatic, meaning that once your blinker is on, it will remain on until you turn it off. I know this isn't ETS2/ATS, but c'mon y'all. When you get into your car, sometimes your player model sits there for 1-3 seconds before opening the door to get in. Plus, there are input issues with both keyboard+mouse and controller. Sometimes, pressing too many things at once (turning + horn + gas) will cut out all of the inputs.

Final thoughts

On a final note, this is the same developer (Astragon) who made Construction Simulator 2015, a game I played for 100+ hours. I hope that this game doesn't fall into the same boat as that game, as it was ultimately stable, but was clunky and lacked in scope and polish. It seems like they have improved somewhat since then as this is a better game, but it only feels like 7 years of improvement in the graphics department, not in the game design department.