Police Officer: you pin the uniform, you put on the badge, and you search pockets for three hours

You pin the uniform, you put on the badge. Or the other way round, I can never remember, and honestly neither can the game.

That is my problem with Police Officer: it hesitates between two jobs and never properly learns either.

The initial misunderstanding

There is a well-established school of police simulator, largely German, that aims at procedural realism and owns it. Those games have you patrol, file reports, and follow protocol to the point of tedium, because that is precisely the subject.

Police Officer does not belong to that school, and its store page says so in its own way: incidents pile up, chaos grows with the station, we are on the entertainment side.

Except that when you look at what the game actually asks you to do, you land on a list that cools you off fast.

Search detainees. Have them empty their pockets. Comb through their belongings for prohibited items. Check identities. Verify visa and residency status. Administer breathalysers. Cross-reference records before letting anyone walk.

That is administration, precisely. And if running a police station means doing that, you can see why almost nobody is queuing up to pin on the badge.

The management half, which is the least botched

To be fair, this is where the game is most coherent.

You run the station: hire officers, assign them to a desk, a patrol or an investigation, dispatch teams, and upgrade facilities to absorb a growing caseload. There are queues to manage, holding cells, interrogation rooms, equipment and security systems to improve.

And there is a triangle of constraints that could have carried the whole game: efficiency, legality and public satisfaction, to be balanced against each other.

On paper that is an excellent subject. A station that processes fast by trampling procedure, or one that respects the law and lets the queue explode, is a genuine moral tension, and it is the kind of dilemma that made the reputation of far more modest games.

In practice it stays a gauge. You correct it, you rebalance, you move on. The game asks the question and never sits with the answer.

One detail worth flagging without turning it into a sermon: checking the visas and residency papers of people passing through the station is a mechanic that a certain border-booth game made frankly uncomfortable, deliberately. Here it is one task among others, between the breathalyser and the bag search. You are entitled to call that a waste of material.

Combat, and the recoil that is not there

Do not come for this.

The fights are incidental and the weapons have no kick whatsoever. You press, something leaves the barrel, nothing moves in your hands. It is the zero point of weapon feel.

That said, let us be fair: players who want guns that shove know where to find them, and it is not in a police station game. It is in Titanfall, whose rifle has more character than the entire annual output of the competitor everyone is thinking of and whose name I would rather not type. Yuck.

So the problem is not that the combat is weak in absolute terms. It is that it exists at all. A police station management game did not need firefights, and the time spent building bad ones would have been better invested in the dilemmas of that triangle above.

The real omission

There is one, and it jumps out of the spec sheet: the game is single-player only.

That is baffling for this specific genre. The whole family of job simulators that has succeeded these past years succeeded through co-op: you laugh with a friend on discovering a collision bug, you split the stupid tasks between you, you turn a chore into an evening. A station queue handled by two friends bouncing drunks back and forth writes itself.

Instead, everyone gets their own station and their own evening. That is the kind of absence that costs more than any technical flaw.

And visually

Generic. Not botched, not ugly, simply interchangeable with a hundred other productions of the same calibre. Smooth-edged characters, clean interiors, neutral lighting. You forget what you saw as you close the game.

The studio is Turquoise Games, published by TK Interactive, and the game launches today.

What I make of it

The game presents itself as entertainment and it is right not to chase realism, because that ground is already held by more rigorous people. The problem is that it does not follow through on the fun either.

Entertainment, in this genre, does not come from the incidents themselves. It comes from the person you are telling about the incident while it happens. Without co-op, a comical mishap is just a mishap.

And the efficiency, legality and satisfaction triangle deserved better than a gauge. There was a game in there about an institution's moral compromises, and it got buried under pocket searches and recoilless pistols.

You pin the uniform, you put on the badge. And after a while you close it.

Do you know a job simulator that holds up solo? Come and prove me wrong on the InsertCoins Discord.