Sharpwood PD rides the roller-coaster of emotion.As the police chief of the titular station, you'll manage cops and deal with the criminal underworld wiggling beneath this small town. Though tough decisions help This Is The Police 2 stand out as a fun management sim, the story itself feels a little underwhelming as it quickly deflates into a mirror of the first game. Breaker, Breaker, One-NineWhen you first start up This Is The Police 2, you'll be introduced to the most noticeable feature of the sequel, the game's XCOM-like combat swat missions (which we'll talk about in more detail later). But after that, the action quickly comes to a screeching halt as you're tossed into a long cutscene that feels like you've been thrown into a small movie you can't get out of.Unfortunately, this is the trend throughout This Is The Police 2; each new day starts with a brief cutscene you can't possibly skip. If you're a fan of the first game, you're probably used to this and won't necessarily be bothered, but if you're someone who wants to get to the action quickly (and haven't played the first game), it's something to note.Following the protagonist from the first game, Jack Boyd, This Is The Police 2 delves into the seedy underworld of a more-or-less traditional cop flick. There's intrigue, there's suspicion, there's blackmail. Gangs and drug traffickers make things dicey, and people are wrongly(?) accused.

There's murder, there's vice, there's corruption.Although all the pieces for a gripping narrative are here - as Jack finds that the only way to escape the dire circumstances around him is to reach out to those around him - the game instead focuses on basically retelling what happened in the first game. It's ultimately a lazy form of storytelling that makes the best parts of This Is The Police 2 less memorable. Managing The Worst Cops EverOnce you finish the game's relatively long introduction, you'll get thrown into the real meat of the game: becoming Sharpwood's police chief. You're going to spend most of your time focused on these duties and responding to calls using your limited resources.This is how it works: at the end of each day, you pick from a roster of officers who you'll assign to the next day's shift. Each officer has a portrait detailing six stats. These stats show how talented each officer is based on their traits of strength, intelligence, speed, stealth, shooting, and negotiation.As you would suspect, your officers use these skills in their day-to-day tasks, and their skills determine how likely it is the officers in question will succeed in stopping crime or serving the public. On top of that, some calls will require multiple officers with a certain score, adding an interesting wrinkle to your overall strategy.Under each portrait is a small line detailing the officer's energy levels. If this bar gets too low, the officer cannot perform any more tasks and takes the day off.

Then you are stuck for 24hrs until the time resets. Real racing 4 download. Trust me, you can earn that in the first hr of playing the game. Currently, that amount is $180k.

Though, if you send an officer home with a low energy bar, it's likely they'll return to duty having gotten sloppy drunk the night before - and it makes them angry and difficult to work with.Of course, as it happens, that's just one line you'll get. You'll quickly discover there's a veritable smorgasbord of excuses just waiting to be gobbled up.When certain officers arrive to report, they'll showcase their expertise in coming up with lame, absolutely absurd excuses as to why they can't work that day. Some officers get too drunk at home or at happy hour or some other seemingly-illegitimate excuse, while others have the gumption to simply say they don't want to work today.Either way, it places a somewhat infuriating burden on the player when they've expect 10 cops show up to work one day and can only start the day with five. This happened a lot in the beginning of the game, and it made answering calls a nightmare before more officers were hired to the force.

This is the Police 2 is a sequel that adds a bit too much to its plate and ends coming up very short. It's a game with great idea and poor. This Is the Police is a strategy/adventure game set in a city spiraling the drain. Taking the role of gritty Police Chief Jack Boyd, you'll dive into a deep story of crime and intrigue.

Fighting Crime in SharpwoodWhen you have your force ready to go, you arrive to a map of Sharpwood and spend the day answering calls.After officers arrive on the scene, you'll be faced with several choices, each of which gives you a unique way of handling the current situation. This is where the officer's skills come into play, since certain actions depend on certain skills. For example, you might need a cop to sneak up on an old man attempting to defecate on a banker's desk (yes, this occurred several times), and if he doesn't pass his sneak check, well.Other times, you'll run into some officers saying they can't head out on call because they're taking a nap or they don't want to go on call with a woman - the excuses never stop in Sharpwood and they only get worse.

When this happened, it felt like another annoying, obstructing feature developed solely to give you an even more difficult situation.Sure, there are lazy misogynists in the world, but having so many didn't necessarily feel organic to the game itself.After your shift, you'll receive the tops of aluminum soda cans - or stay-tabs - which act as the game's currency. Based on how well your team did during the day, you'll get a certain amount to add more officers to the force and provide more equipment to your team.With enough balancing, you should add enough new faces to the force to endure those rougher (ahem, lazier) days and eventually gain loyalty with your officers, which becomes more useful as the main story unwinds. SWAT MissionsThe game's SWAT missions show up much like any other call does.

You'll assign officers and when they arrive, your cops have the option to talk to three witnesses. They'll talk, but only if you give up one of the confiscated items Jack has in his office. Sometimes the intel's good, other times, it's useless.After a bit of chatting, you'll get taken to the scene of the crime and observe the mission from an over-the-top perspective.

Here, you'll manage your cops much like you would manage soldiers in an XCOM mission. Though, the XCOM soldiers were likely far better disciplined, and vastly more useful.If you've assigned officers not loyal to Jack, or those who simply don't like him, they'll do whatever they want during the mission. This doesn't mean they're ignoring your commands every couple of turns.

No, that'd be too easy. These rogue officers straight up have a bloodthirsty A.I. Controlling them, having them shoot any perpetrator(s) they run into.This becomes a huge problem in the beginning of the game because you want to arrest these criminals, not kill them, because you receive less stay-tabs if they're dead.Of course, that's likely the difficulty behind it. The game wants to prevent you from getting too many stay-tabs early, making it a tad bit harder to turn the Sharpwood PD around. But in some ways, it feels like frustrating design more than anything else.Lastly, based on the crime happening in the SWAT mission, the parameters for success change. Again, because half of your squad will likely not listen to you in the beginning, you'll probably be following the A.I.

Officers through the map as they unleash a devastating bloodbath on unsuspecting criminals.I truly felt sorry for them - and a bit frustrated. The Bottom LineThis Is The Police 2 focuses on a number of different features all at once. At the beginning, the game feels a little bit like it's out to get you. The game's unprofessional cops do nothing to help you gain a running start, and you can easily trip up from there as additional obtuse features call for your attention as the game progresses.The first cutscene of the game took nearly half an hour to finish and each individual scene after dragged on too long. Though, this was the initial set up and every subsequent one became snappier as it transitioned into the game and gave you more control. Once you're managing your cops and handling situations, the story provides a great direction for what you need to do and leaves you having a great time in the management portion.The two worst parts of the game are the SWAT missions and the cutscenes.

While the cutscenes feel hefty, the voice actors do a great job delivering emotional moments and the added camera shakes raise the presentation as the tension thickens. The SWAT sections feel unnecessarily unfair as some police officers are controlled by an unwieldy and brazen A.I., leading to the feeling that you never really have control of supposedly the best units in the game.If you're looking for a tough management simulator with light role playing decisions, this game is certainly up your alley.

It's not perfect, but for fans of the genre, it provides a good amount of fun if you can overlook some of its blemishes.You can buy This Is The Police 2 on for $14.99.Note: The publisher provided the copy of This Is The Police 2 used for this review.

This Is The Police (TITP) is a game about being uncomfortable. It’s a game about making impossible choices. But most of all, it’s a game about control. Wanting control, having control, and losing control.

After roughly 40 hours with the game, I’m still not sure if I like it or not. It’s a fascinating game, to say the least, and what it attempts to do is incredible, even if it doesn’t quite pull it off.In This Is The Police, you take control of the life of Jack Boyd, the esteemed and well-respected Chief of Police for the fictional city of Freeburg. Despite the name, Freeburg is anything but free; there’s a war on the streets and everyone’s involved.

Gang activity runs rampant, the media are corrupt, the citizens are angry, and the police? Well, the police are just trying to keep the city from burning to the ground. But Jack Boyd has more on the line; he’s 6 months from forced retirement, and he doesn’t have a penny saved to support himself. This Is The Police has you make the choice to help the city, or help Jack fill his pockets before his time is up.The game plays like a classic strategy game with a few very interesting twists. Classic time-based tasks are replaced by police call outs, where you have to designate a certain number of officers (the “resources” of the game) to investigate a crime. Depending on the severity of the crime, and the number of officers you send, the time taken to sufficiently investigate the crime can vary in length.

It’s largely up to the player to determine how many officers need to go to each call out, and in most cases you can send as many or as few as you’d like. There’s a lot of quick thinking and strategy to this, as some calls will require more or less officers than it might seem, and some calls are even better left ignored, either because they’re total hoaxes, or because some old lady is just super racist and thinks a person of colour is stalking them, when in fact they’re just delivering the mail.As you progress, you’ll come into contact with various gang leaders who want favours from you, and it’s here where things get a little bit dicey. While it is technically possible to finish TITP without ever doing anything illegal, it’s far from plausible to play the game this way.

The easiest way to make money is to send officers to do jobs for the gang leaders, or to ignore a particular call out. Of course, this means that people often get killed, and that means bad press. Bad press means that City Hall steps in, and the punishments from City Hall can be devastating.

Hardwood comes from the big trees nearby, but the axe you crafted for the tutorial isn’t strong enough so you must smelt copper and tin (obtained via mining trips to the abandoned ruins or hacking away at stones) to make bronze bars and buy an expensive (for this stage in the game) upgrade kit from a local store. You now have the ability to get hardwood!But you need hardwood planks not hardwood, so you’ll need a cutter. My time at portia review reddit.

Sometimes you’ll get your pay docked, which doesn’t mean much when you’ve got near-constant income from gang activity, but sometimes you’ll lose officer slots, meaning your force is effectively crippled until you appease City Hall again.The problem is that with a smaller force, it’s harder to respond to every call, and calls will quite often go badly. It’s far too easy to spiral downwards, with City Hall punishments leading to a less effective force, leading to more City Hall punishments. TITP requires a balancing act worthy of Cirque du Soleil, and it takes a lot of careful planning and thinking ahead to even get through a single day sometimes. That gets tiring after a while, and though the strategy elements are certainly compelling and interesting, tedium sets in quickly when faced with 180 days of the Same. That said, the voice acting that comes every few days in a story cutscene makes the repetition almost worth it, with Jon St.

John (better known as the voice of Duke Nukem) doing some incredibly heavy lifting in his portrayal of Jack Boyd, and the rest of the voice cast filling the gaps in a more than satisfactory way.One thing that’s irked me consistently since starting my playthrough is the seemingly flippant way that TITP handles social issues. A lot of the issues you hear about in the city of Freeburg come from the (admittedly biased) media, with headlines about sexual misconduct, sexism, racism and corruption thrown at you at the beginning of each day. Sometimes these issues come up in the game, but they’re handled in a really absurd way. On my first week as chief of police, I was told by City Hall to increase the percentage of black police officers on my force to meet a diversity quota. But a few days later, after some extremely conservative newspapers made up a story about gang violence, I was told to reduce the number of black officers to zero, or else face severe punishment.

I couldn’t indiscriminately fire officers, else I’d face unlawful dismissal lawsuits, so my only option was to send them to their deaths in dangerous call outs with no backup. Another instance had me send police out to a peaceful feminist march, and under orders from the mayor, I was to arrest them all, despite peaceful protest being very much a protected right.TITP doesn’t do much beyond presenting these horrible decisions and letting you decide what happens, but it seems like the way to win is always to be an extremely shitty person. I could never quite figure out if the game was trying to address these issues in a meaningful way, or just be super edgy by constantly bringing them up. I lean towards the former, if only because I struggle to believe that anybody could really be as awful as the game wants me to be, but the shrouding of a clear message hurts the game more than it helps it.This Is The Police tries to do something interesting, both in its storytelling and its gameplay, and while it delivers a unique experience, its lack of commitment is ultimately its downfall. That’s not to say it does any one thing poorly, but rather it does many things decently and few things well.

The gameplay is interesting enough to keep you entertained, but the lack of variety in day-to-day missions becomes tedious quickly. The only aspect of the game that truly stands out is its ability to make you feel something. Sometimes that’s enough to overlook the shortcomings of a game, but this is not one of those cases.Rating: 3/5. Final ThoughtsThis Is The Police tries to do something interesting, both in its storytelling and its gameplay, and while it delivers a unique experience, its lack of commitment is ultimately its downfall. That's not to say it does any one thing poorly, but rather it does many things decently and few things well. The gameplay is interesting enough to keep you entertained, but the lack of variety in day-to-day missions becomes tedious quickly. The only aspect of the game that truly stands out is its ability to make you feel something.

Sometimes that's enough to overlook the shortcomings of a game, but this is not one of those cases.