I was having a bit of a depression day a couple of weeks back. We’ve had some glorious weather here in the U.K. An early summer in spring, which usually helps to put me in a better mood… but I was still having a bit of a downer. Then I received an email granting me a review code for a game that I’ve had my eye on for over a year. My mood changed as I installed The Precinct from developer Fallen Tree Games and publisher Kwalee. After reviewing Fallen Tree Games’ previous title, American Fugitive – I couldn’t wait to get into The Precinct.

“Averno City, 1983. Gangs rule the streets and your father lies restless in his grave. Clean up the city, uncover the truth, and embark on thrilling vehicle chases through destructible environments in this neon-noir action sandbox police game.”

I have a very vivid memory from over 40 years ago, when I was five or six. This memory was my Mom asking what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said that I wanted to be a policeman. When I got older, my career took a very different path, but I always loved the idea of being a policeman. As a youngster, I used watch Starsky & Hutch and play games like Sierra’s Police Quest titles or Hill Street Blues (based on the TV show) and imagine I was a real cop working the beat on the tough streets. It wasn’t just about the action, I liked the procedures. Take Sierra’s Police Quest as an example. That game was brutal and would punish you for making the most basic mistake. Didn’t check your car before going out on patrol, get a puncture and game over. Pullover a driver and get of of your car without following the correct procedures, get shot dead and game over. You’d even have to take a shower before and after your shift in Police Quest.

Still, I’ve always wanted a more modern take on that type of game. A title where you play as a rookie beat cop and have to deal with the mundane as well as the more exciting aspects of being a police officer. Here’s where The Precinct comes into play, it is exactly the kind of game I have been craving for decades.

You play as the fresh out of training, new recruit at Averno City Police Department, Nick Cordell Jr. However, Nick is no ordinary rookie, he’s the son of an ACPD much respected legend, police chief Nick Cordell Sr. Okay, that should read ex-police chief Nick Cordell Sr. You see, Nick Sr. was killed several years ago. This is the main meat of the story (that I’m not going to spoil here), Nick Jr. working with his late Father’s colleagues and fighting crime on the streets of Averno City. Who knows, you just might learn who killed your Father and why.

The Precinct has two main play styles. There’s the more linear-ish gameplay that sees you taking on set missions to advance the story. The basics are that there are two warring gangs responsible for all the crime in the city, and you have to get to the head honcho of those gangs. But, you can’t just go straight after the big boss, you need to learn who they are. You do that by solving crimes around the city and getting evidence. Get enough evidence and you can take down the gang’s captain, who will lead you to the under boss, who will ultimately lead you to the main boss of the gang. Take down the big boss and you end that gang. As I say, this is linear-ish, in that the missions for the main gang members are set.

Then there’s the more open-world gameplay. Here, you can pick from several police patrols to go on (or create you own custom patrol) as your work shift. Each shift will last a set number of in-game hours. These patrols very from being on foot and walking the beat, heading out in a patrol car, or even taking to the skies in the police helicopter. You’ll be tasked with concentrating on one particular crime. You may need to check that the residents of Averno City are parking correctly. See someone parked on the sidewalk? Give them a ticket. Parked too close to a crossing? Give them a ticket. Parked at an expired parking meter? Give them a ticket. The thing is that you have to correctly asses the situation and ensure that you issue the correct ticket for the parking infractions.

Maybe you’ll be asked to patrol the streets in your car and take care of speeders or drunk drivers. You’ll have to get behind a car and follow them, asses their speed, run a licence plate check or see if they are swerving all over the road. If you suspect a driver of breaking the law, give them a little flash of your lights and siren to get them to pull over. Maybe they will, maybe they’ll be cooperative and stop just as you ask.. maybe they’ll put their foot down and start a police chase.

If they do decide to make a run for it, you have to chase them down and stop them. You get rewarded for good driving and maintaining a close distance to the suspect. This builds a meter that you can then use to call in backup. Ask for another patrol car to join the chase, have a spike strip put down, call in the helicopter and more. Whether the driver stops of their own accord, or whether you have had to chase them down, you’ll then have to make the right calls to see them punished. If a driver is guilty of nothing more than a bit of littering, you can write them a ticket and send them on their way. If they are guilty of something more serious, you’ll need to decide what they have done wrong before arresting them.

The more serious the crime and the more accurate your report is, the more experience points you’ll earn at the end of your shift. You level up and gain access to more police vehicles, weapons and upgrade tokens. You can then spend those upgrade tokens on new skills, yeah, there’s a skill tree here that will help you become a better cop. That is the basic gist of the gameplay, but there is quite a lot of depth here. However, I feel that The Precinct will be a very divisive title that will see opinions split down two distinct camps. The simple fact is that, you’re either going to find the slower paced bits and following procedure dull and repetitive, or you’re going to embrace the idea of roleplaying as a beat cop and enjoy the mundane aspects as much as the action. Let me see if I can break down the core gameplay loop for you.

There is a lot of crime in Averno City… an absolute ton of it. It’s impossible for you to attended every possible call out and you’ll even see other crimes being committed as you deal with a different one. As an example, you can be on parking infraction duty, but see a mugging, some vandalism or something else and you can choose to deal with that crime instead, or you can ignore it and carry on handing out parking tickets. There is a lot of freedom here and because (outside of the main story) the crimes are randomly generated, no two playthroughs will be the same (outside of the main story).

Anyway, back to the gameplay loop. I’m going to pick the lowest level of crime here, littering. Let’s say you are patrolling in your car (can also patrol on foot) and you see a driver litter. You can give the siren button a double tap to do that “whoop-whoop” blast that they always do in TV shows and movies (which I love doing in the game). This indicates that you want the driver to pull over. At this point, one of several things can happen (at random). Yeah, the driver might just pull over and let you give them a fine for littering. They pull over, you talk to them, run their ID through the system, no other crimes pop up, you put littering on the write up and issue the driver with a fine. Done, nice and neat.

However, not all drivers will be so appreciative of being stopped, some might have something to hide. So let’s say you do the “whoop-whoop” siren, pull a litterer over, run their ID through the system. Only, this time, you learn they are wanted from something much more serious, like murder. You attempt to put the cuffs on, they fight back and run for it. A foot chase kicks off. It may not even get to this point because you can do the “whoop-whoop” siren, the driver pulls over, you get out of your car and the driver puts their foot down. A car chase begins. Hey, you can even do the “whoop-whoop” siren and the driver tries to speed off without pulling over. There are so many variables at play here, and that was just for a basic littering stop. There are loads of different crimes in the game, littering, mugging, vandalism, drug dealing and more.

Yet, this is where I feel the divide of opinions will come. It doesn’t matter what the crime is, whether the perpetrator is cooperative or not. Every crime is delt with the same way. If you have just stopped a litterer, or a mugger, or a drug dealer, or whatever, you have to run the ID through the system, search them, give them a breathalyser tests (if drunk). You then have to put the correct crime(s) on their charge sheet and then decide a fine (for lesser crime, or you can let them go) or arrest (for more serious crimes). Still, every single crime needs to be logged on the charge sheet… every single time. Let me tell you, I stopped hundreds upon hundreds of crimes during my playthrough, and I have the achievements to prove it. So that is hundreds of times I had to run someone’s ID… hundreds of times. I had to select the correct crime(s) from a list (split into three categories) hundreds of times. I had to issue hundreds of fines and I carried out hundreds of arrests too.

Now, there are a couple of available shortcuts. You don’t have to log the crimes yourself, you can ask your partner to do it for you. You can even mix the two methods. You can log any crimes you believe are right, then ask your partner to log the crimes as a double-check thing and get any you may have missed. The other shortcut is to just use a handy auto add offenses option and not have to worry about them at all, you then just have to stop and arrest, no messing. When it does comes to arresting, you can choose to escort the perp to your car, put them in the back seat and drive to the ACPD. Then take them out of the car, walk them into the precinct and book them in yourself… or you can just call for someone else to come and do all of that for you. So yeah, there are shortcuts if you find the slower bits too slow.

It is tedious, it is laborious (when not using the shortcuts) and as I said earlier, you’re either going to find the slower paced bits and following procedure dull and repetitive, or you’re going to embrace the idea of roleplaying as a beat cop and enjoy the mundane aspects as much as the action. Me? I loved it, I really enjoyed playing policeman and having to do the paperwork (of this game’s version of paperwork). Yeah, it does get repetitive, but that is the life of a police officer. It’s not all high-speed chases and shootouts. I think that the game balances the action with the mundane well. The fact that no two crimes ever play out the exactly same way adds a lot of interest to the game loop. You never know if the person you have stopped will be cooperative, or if they will try to make a run for it. But now that I have got the slower aspects of the game out of the way, onto the action.

As I said before, the game is split into two main play styles. All of the main story stuff is linear, the missions will always be the same and take place in the same locations. Unfortunately, all of the major crimes are linked to the main story. Bank robberies, mass shootouts, murders, etc. In fact, there’s a subplot that runs alongside the main plot where you have to try to track down a serial killer. Outside of the story, the crimes are more basic. As an example, while you can pull a car over, run the driver’s ID through the system and have the check come back that they are wanted for murder, that’s as close to a murder investigation you’re going to get (outside of the main story). You can and will get involved in the odd gang shootout, but they’re never as grandiose as they are in the story.

The car chases are fantastic. At first, I felt that the car handling was a little too lose, too slippery – but that’s the point. The game is trying to recreate the over the top car chases that you would see in classic TV shows and movies and you’re supposed to pull off massive slides around corners and such. Once I got used to it, the car handling was a joy and chases soon became awesome. I adored tearing through the streets, weaving in and out of traffic, darting down tight alleys and such. The foot chases are great too and will have you running through backstreets, jumping over fences and more.

The map isn’t huge, but I see that as a good thing. I really get annoyed by overly massive maps that become a chore to get around. The Precinct offers a map that is small enough to navigate, without frustration, and big enough to keep you entertained. Plus, the game is crammed with fun details. You’ll have NPCs walking around and quoting lines from TV and movies. Sometimes anachronistically so. Yeah I noticed someone quoting Back to the Future – which was released in 1985, but this game is set in 1983. The map feels alive with little background details. then there’s one of my favourite bits, the sirens. You can change your siren on the fly and pick from a “bee-boo bee-boo”, “woo-woo-woo-woo”, “wooooooooooooo-ooooooooo”, and others. Or just set up a random siren. I’m not sure if an almost 50 year old man should get so much joy from paying around with police sirens, but I did. And yeah, you can do a Starsky & Hutch-like slide over the car’s hood. It’s awesome.

There’s several distractions to do outside of all the policework too. Stunt jumps to find and do, street races, hidden cars to discover, and there’s an optional sub-quest to locate several stolen museum artefacts. The Precinct crams a lot of gameplay in and offers up plenty of variety. There’s always something to do and the game never really stops until you reach the end credits.

There’s plenty of good, now for some bad. I did come across several bugs and glitches. The most major one was that I had the game hard reset numerous times, I’m talking double numbers. I honestly stopped counting when I got to ten hard resets. Thankfully, the game always seemed to reset after I had finished a shift and after the game had auto-saved, so I didn’t lose any progress – but it was still rather annoying having to reload the game over and over. I had one instance when I pulled a drunk driver over, did the breathalyser test and asked them to get out of the car. When they did, everyone began walking on the spot. Me, the drunk driver and all the NPCs. I could do nothing then, the game was kind of frozen in this everyone walking on the spot cycle.

Another bug happened when I was doing a foot chase. I jumped on the perp to stop them, the animation of me stopping them played out then, as I got to my feet, I floated just off the surface of the map and could only move in one direction. Everything else was fine, cars and NPCs moved around the city as normal, but I was floating just over the map. With another minor bug, I kept hearing popping and cracking during the audio of the cutscenes. Finally, I had a glitch where the on-screen button prompt is replaced with “unknown”, which really messed up the display. I had to go into the control options, select default controls (even though I had not changed them and they were already default) and that seemed to fix the issue… but the “unknown” thing would randomly keep coming back.

Still, bugs and glitches aside, I highly recommend The Precinct (you can tell by how long this review is)… but with a caveat. The slower bits and all of the more mundane aspects of being a beat cop may not appeal to all (use the shortcuts), and the game definitely needs a patch or three to iron out some of the creases and bugs. For me, this is the best and most fun game I have played this year. I enjoyed it so much that I started another playthrough after finishing, with the aim to get 100%… even though you can keep playing after the credits to mop up anything you missed. I just wanted to play the game again. If Fallen Tree Games’ previous title, American Fugitive, is anything to go by – then the patches and updates will come and The Precinct is only going to get better and better.