Police Simulator: Patrol Officers Review (Xbox One)

STAFF REVIEW of Police Simulator: Patrol Officers (Xbox One)

Thursday, December 15, 2022.
by Josh Morgan

Police Simulator: Patrol Officers Box art

Woop! Woop! That’s the sound of da police! Police Simulator: Patrol Officers is sliding across the hood of your consoles and into your living rooms. Is it a game where you play as a shoot first, sprinkle some crack on the body, pay off forensics, and be home in time for a family dinner type of cop? Or do you play as a by-the-book meter maid that loves paperwork, has unlimited stamina, and a 1000-yard stare only a mother could love? Well, we’ll see how smart you are when the K-9 comes. I got 99 Problems but is this game one?

There’s no traditional story here with Police Simulator, you are a standard template officer that patrols the city of Brighton. You can choose male or female and there are very minimal choices of races and faces to pick from. You also don’t get to name your character; I was very bummed I wasn’t allowed to name my character Captain O’Malley from the Cypress Hill songs, so I settled on the name Frank Miller. You don’t get any backstory for the officer you chose, like, does he or she have a family to go home to like Carl Winslow? Or is he or she a loose cannon that lives the single life in a motorhome on a beach like Riggs? These are things I would have liked to know!

You start off in a small section of the city and you can unlock the next precinct by issuing parking tickets and arresting those despicable jaywalkers and litterers during your shift, filling up your experience bar. You get experience points for accurately issuing tickets and conducting yourself as a respectable officer. You lose points for issuing the wrong ticket, mischarging someone for an offense, and randomly tasing and shooting people (hey, I had to try it... you know, for the review). You move through the motions of your day-to-day life as a patrol officer with the dangling carrot of more features to unlock in front of you as you progress to new areas.

First, you’ll be on foot, and you’re on parking violation duty. You’ll run up and down the streets of your jurisdiction looking for cars parked on the curb, parked facing the wrong way, expired license plates, and parked in front of expired meters. You have an ability wheel that you can bring up when near one of these dastardly cars and you can pick the violation, or violations, to dish out. At first this was a blast; I actually had a good time ruining everyone’s day in the city of Brighton by issuing a lot of violations and fines with no verbal warnings. Hey, the city needs its money and I have a quota to fill.

As you finish off a few shifts you’ll unlock a patrol car, and I had visions of the cops from the Beastie Boys Sabotage video chasing perps and slamming them on car hoods all while wearing cool sunglasses. But the truth is this is no different than being on foot except the controls are worse. The controls are exactly like the hundreds of other games that feature driving, but the handling of your vehicle is pretty loose, and I found myself running into a lot of things trying to keep it on the road and in my lane. After a bit of practice, you do get the hang of the driving, but don’t expect Forza accurate controls here. What made driving worse was the extreme pop-in as you are driving down the street at even low speeds, and I had multiple people and cars appear within 5 feet in front of me while driving. Lucky for the people, you drive right through them as if they were ghosts, but when you hit a car, it affects your rating for your shift. If you get into too many accidents you are forced to start your shift over.

Searching the car, looking for the product, thinking every NPC is selling narcotics. Once you unlock the car it really opens up the game for traffic stops and responding to accidents. As you pull out of the precinct parking lot and make your way down the streets of Brighton, you’ll start getting pop-ups about cars in your vicinity breaking the law. The most common infractions are turning without a signal, failure to stop at a red light or stop sign, or driving with a faulty exhaust. Once you see these pop up, fire up those berries and cherries and start pursuit! Turning on your lights and siren will get all cars to pull to the side, but you won’t start the pull over process until you hit the Y button behind the car. From here you exit your squad car and begin the process of speaking to the driver and issuing the ticket.

As you are inspecting the situation with the driver and issuing the ticket you will get intuition pop-ups telling you about the driver's actions. Some drivers will act nervous, so these are your clues to investigate the situation further. If you smell alcohol on the driver, you can ask them to get out of the car and give them a DUI test. If they fail, you can arrest them and call for the paddy wagon to come get them. Some drivers that act suspicious have items on them or in the car that can get them in trouble. Once you get these intuition tips, you have reason to have them exit the car and begin your search. I’ve found a wide variety of items during my searches but the weirdest was human teeth and there were no further investigation options for this, and that is extremely wild to me. If I were a cop and I found some random human teeth hidden in a car that would be a huge red flag for me and I’d be asking more questions. I attempted to arrest this amateur dentist but there were no options for finding human remains in a car, so I was forced to let Dr. Issac Yankem go. Yes, that is an old school WWF reference, look it up!

Upon unlocking the squad car, you also unlock investigations at accidents. You’ll get blips on the screen notifying you of nearby accidents, so you’ll have to make your way to those locations and begin the process of filing the accident report. You’ll have to interview witnesses, interview the people in the accident, and take pictures of the crash site, and as you do so you will fill up the report meter. You’ll get a pop-up telling you when the report is complete and at this point you can issue tickets and call tow trucks if needed.

The graphics in Police Simulator are a mixed bag, but I have to be honest, I was pleasantly surprised with the environments. Lighting, in particular the way it bounces off shiny surfaces and shines through trees, is very accurate and really helps bring the city to life. One weird thing that happened to me, but I don’t know if it was a glitch in my particular game or not, the game never had me playing at night. It was always daylight out even when the time said 4AM. I’ve watched some gameplay videos online and saw plenty of people playing at night, but not once in the many hours I spent with the game did I have a shift in the dark, even though the time of day was at night. The character models in Police Simulator are very limited, as you’ll see the same face a million times and they all give the same lifeless 1000-yard stare. The random outfits that the citizens wear are wild and you’ll see some crazy combinations of hairdos and clothes on people walking the streets. A black woman with a blonde mohawk wearing a sundress with combat boots was among the weirdest ones, but hey, you do you lady!

The overall gameplay loop of Police Simulator is fun enough, but what really broke the game for me were the terrible glitches when it comes to the NPC's. I had many interactions go bad due to the poor AI. Honestly, it’s too many instances of glitches to mention in this review, but I can list a few as examples. Many times I called for backup to arrest someone and the van never showed up, or the van parked two blocks away and the backup officer got lost or stuck. Multiple times I approached an accident and started questioning the people at the scene, so when I approached the driver that caused the accident, he/she didn’t even respond to my options like they did anything wrong. In one case, a woman turned onto a street and ran over two pedestrians. I immediately questioned the two people lying on the ground, and when they didn’t respond I called an ambulance. I then went to the woman standing outside of the car that obviously hit these two poor people and she greeted me with a “Hello officer, what can I do for you?” and my option wheel made no mention of reckless driving or vehicular assault. I could only give her violations for failure to use a turn signal and running a red light. I went to ask some witnesses and they all said they didn’t see what happened and when I went to take pictures of the scene, none of the photos were logged into the case file or report. I failed the interaction and lost points for turning in an incomplete report even though the game bugged out and prevented me from completing it.

Sometimes the arbitrary limitations of the game are what gets in your way. I came across someone that littered and upon talking to them I got a pop-up saying this person was really nervous and smelled like pot. So, I searched him and found a switchblade in his pocket (no pot though). I was able to start to arrest him for a concealed weapon when he took off running. Now, my character has a messy history of shooting people with a taser. I've had many, many warnings on the subject so this time my plan was to chase them down and play things by the book. The criminal on the other hand had a different plan of action and immediately ran towards the border of my jurisdiction, and shortly after following him into this checkered area on the map I was kicked off my shift and forced to start the day over due to being out of the zone. This also happened to me when pulling over cars and they turned into the yellow checkered zone. I don’t see why you can’t follow them into another zone if you started the process of pulling them over or began pursuit on foot.

I had some fun with Police Simulator at first, but the bugs and glitches really hurt the experience. It’s fun enough running around for an hour or so issuing tickets for parking, littering, drinking in public and jaywalking, but when you really have to interact with the AI the game really breaks down. Having the game mechanics of investigations, arresting and calling for backup completely fail due to poor AI is really disappointing. There’s a decent core game here, but it trips over its own feet too much that it can be really frustrating to play at times. There is some fun to be had causing havoc and seeing what you can get away with before your shift is forcefully ended, but after an hour or so of that the novelty wears off and you’re left with getting back to work.

**Police Simulator: Patrol Officers was provided by the publisher and reviewed on an Xbox Series X**

Overall: 5.0 / 10
Gameplay: 5.0 / 10
Visuals: 6.0 / 10
Sound: 6.0 / 10

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STAFF REVIEW of Police Simulator: Patrol Officers (Xbox One)

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