Preview: The Precinct mixes intense action with writing parking tickets

There have been a few “real job” simulators released in the past few years that try to emulate police work. Most of these fail as they just try to go for outright realism, and walking around for hours, occasionally giving out parking tickets, doesn’t make for a fun game. This is where The Precinct does things differently, as while it does try to simulate the day-to-day of an American police officer, it makes sure to give you some action between the traffic stops and littering tickets.

You play as the rookie son of a hero cop who died in circumstances that are definitely clean cut and won’t be called into question as the plot unfolds, and you’re immediately assigned a partner who just can’t stop talking about how close he is to retirement – I’ll start shopping for funeral attire now, shall I?

The Precinct does a great job of capturing these B-movie cop tropes, but it doesn’t revel in them to the point of exhaustion. Instead, it lets them slowly seep in from the background and give the world this downbeat vibe where it feels hard for a rookie officer to make a difference, then leverages that to set up the criminal gangs you’ll need to take down as part of the story.

Each day, you get to choose your beat, giving you an area of the city to patrol and what crimes you’re on the lookout for. The city itself feels quite small from your top-down perspective, but that means you quickly become familiar with it as you go about your work. Some days you’ll be walking the streets dealing with any disturbances, other times you’ll be driving around keeping the roads safe instead. As you patrol, you’ll either spot crimes taking place or you’ll be prompted to check out a location on your radio, at which point you go over and deal with the crime appropriately.

Sometimes this will just be a case of checking their ID and giving them a ticket – all of which is done through a series of radial menus – other times, they’ll try to run or turn violent, and that’s when things become more action-packed, resulting in a bombastic car chase or a brawl, with the perpetrators actions determining the level of authorized force and the severity of the backup you can call for. Either way, when you catch them, you need to go through all of the possible crimes and work out which ones they need to be charged for, with XP rewarded for each one you correctly identify.

You aren’t just doing that to no end, though, as during each shift, you’ll also be finding evidence against the gangs that operate in the city, with each piece of evidence offering progress to uncovering the bosses of those gangs. When you uncover one, you get to go on one of the game’s story missions, which are where the big set-pieces and shootouts occur that help break up the monotony of going on patrol.

Although it mostly relies on the tropes and tone of classic cop shows and movies to avoid the complicated issues with the police today, it does occasionally rub up against them in ways I don’t think it was meant to. For example, many members of the criminal gangs can be found roaming the streets, easily identifiable by their attire, and many of them will be carrying the pieces of evidence you need to progress towards the story missions.

If you search them without any cause, you will be punished with a reduction of XP, however, that reduction of XP is so minor that it’s almost always outweighed by what you gain when you find evidence. It means you’re actively encouraged to profile a certain group and search them without reason for your benefit, and while that is grounds to make an excellent point about the state of modern policing, it’s probably not a point the game intended to make.

Still, if you can put those uncomfortable connotations aside, The Precinct is a fun police game. It has a bit of that enjoyable mundanity of police work while regularly balancing it out with car chases and brawls to stop it from dragging. With the occasional special shootout mission of helicopter search, you end up with a game small in scope but with plenty of variety to keep you busy.