Reviews from

in the past


A nice strategy game with a really in depth and intriguing storyline. Though the gameplay needs some tweaking, it's still very engaging and sometimes even stressful to decided who goes to do what.

It's only bogged down by how long it is, it seriously doesn't need to be nearly 20-30 hours long, and the lack of a free-play mode (IE a mode that's just the gameplay without worrying about the overarching story) kind of hurts but that's just me.

it's an overall 8/10 despite it's flaws.

Game has a nice idea and an easy but interesting crime system to get you hooked through the story.

However it gets repetitive way too quickly, and it demands you do the cycle for around 100 days which is a tad too much for my taste.

A really cool idea, and being able to buy a bunch of classical and jazz records is really awesome, but most of the rest of the game is kinda slow and tedious with a little too much of a reliance on rng for my tastes

Great core gameplay loop, funny and surprisingly fun strategy. Not really anything special though, and they didn't randomize the events for some strange reason so every playthrough is the same. Fun to stream.


I've always been torn on how actually good this game is because its story is incredibly interesting while at the same time being extremely stupid soemtimes. Its gameplay is fun but at the same time gets incredibly boring very fast.

In This is the Police you play as Jack Boyd, a police chief in a city called "Freeburg" and if that doesn't tell you what kind of message the game is trying to get across then the first few events in the story certainly will, with your first choice basically being how hard you want to sell out to the Mafia, which is inevitable either way.

Even though I kinda made fun of it there it's actually a really interesting story. It's essentially about how the institution of the police turns even the most well-intentioned cops into horrible people some way or another. How the position of Police Chief is always going to ripe with corruption in one way or another. And how Jack's ambitions of power and bitterness turn him into an increasingly horrible person, as well as showing that he may never have been as a good of a person as he thought he was.

I think compared to its sequel it definitely has a huge leg-up narrative and storywise. The second game is almost completely character focused, set in a smaller town in Minnesota. This is fine, the story is good enough in that game, but it just doesn't manage to match this games experience imo.

The main reason I feel this way is because the city is really well made, it feels like through the calls and investigations you can feel the issues the city is facing without it actually being explained to you. It paints a picture of the city without you ever having to actually see it for the most part. It's an experience which you realy don't get in the second game.

That being said, the dialogue doesn't always land too well, it obviously takes influence from a lot of movies and such, but every once in a while it feels like Jack Boyd is a bit too much like a movie character. Also cutscenes feel a bit slow sometimes, either the amount of dialogue or simply the pacing of the cutscene.

The main problem with this game is that its gameplay is kinda boring, especially for how long it is, something the second game definitely improved on dramatically. In this game you send cops out on calls, sometimes you need to help them, sometimes they'll need to call in the SWAT team, but every time it's pretty much the same. It's fun for a while, definitely not for the many hours long this game is.

tbh I only wrote a review on this game at all because it's a game I think about a lot for some reason, it's definitely worht checking out if it sounds interesting to you




The management aspect is very monotonous and all the developments that occur are cheap and don't improve the loop, some events or game rules are just silly and arbitrary.
Payoff is very weak and i'm not even critiquing the narrative here, in fact the narrative is the only thing that I might praise.
Recap and get into the sequel if you're intrigued, because you won't find value for time sunk here.

Parts of this are so fun and unique it creates an experience you could always remember, commanding your fleet of cops and detectives is engaging and intense even though you're just looking at a map the whole time basically. However as much as I like the gameplay it is also the ultimate downfall for this game imo. It becomes so ridiculously difficult near the end and solving the detective cases nearly impossible that it completely ruins the experience and doesn't inspire me to go back and play it again. Way too much RNG and that can't be understated

If this was 5, maybe 6 hours long I would have liked it. It's way too long and simply ran out of patience for it. I will say it has a really nice atmosphere and it pulls off its style beautifully; the voice-acting is great and I will never not love having an in-game radio to listen to music with.

I like this game a lot. It feels a lot like Commissioner Gordon's story in Batman Year One. Not related genuinely but it makes me think of it.