Police Simulator: Patrol Officers
Review
Reporting for duty
by Dan Lenois
reviewed on PC
Reporting for duty
Developed by Aesir Interactive and published by Astragon Entertainment, Police Simulator: Patrol Officers was originally released as a Steam Early Access game on June 17th, 2021, and since its debut, has received a series of steady major and minor updates reworking, fixing, and expanding the available content. One could probably argue that in this respect, this game represents the ideal kind of Early Access game. But it could also be argued that nevertheless, Police Simulator: Patrol Officers also commits many of the sins that people most commonly negatively attribute to all Early Access games. The truth, as it generally does, lies somewhere in the middle.
The map size of Police Simulator: Patrol Officer’s open world is moderately large, although many of the tasks, especially foot patrol assignments, will limit your range to a single defined smaller section of the map. It’s not until you’ve already spent at least six or eight hours unlocking your first fourteen stars in the game’s progression system that you can freely wander about the open world, helping out wherever and whenever you want, via the game’s 'Open Patrol' mode, which functions similarly to most other games’ "Free Roam" mode. It may take you a while to unlock, but it’s almost indisputable that 'Open Patrol' is the best way to experience what Police Simulator: Patrol Officer has on offer.
Disorder and confusion everywhere
Your duties as an officer often range far beyond your assigned task. While most of my main objectives appeared to involve checking license plates and gunning for speeding drivers, I would often find myself dedicating the vast majority of my time to side objectives like providing pedestrians directions to wherever they were looking to go, chasing down wallet thieves, hunting down at-large suspects, resolving vehicle accident disputes, etc. The first few hours of gameplay is deceptively slow-paced to encourage the player to gradually familiarize themselves with basic game mechanics, before eventually opening up the map with additional zones, as well as new main and side objective types. Expect to earn some very easy XP by keeping an eye out for littering as well as people openly carrying alcohol. It would seem that many of the NPC residents in Police Simulator: Patrol Officers adhere to Hawkeye Pierce's philosophy of "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happy hour". Players will have to keep a close watch on the passing time to ensure that they don’t end up failing their main objective because they were too preoccupied grinding away on side objectives.
Crime doesn’t pay, except when it does
In order to have a successful shift, players must keep a careful eye on two side-by-side currency systems: Conduct Points and District XP. At the start of their shift, the player starts with 100 Conduct Points. This number will go down if the player violates certain rules that officers must follow. This can include frisking an NPC without justifiable cause, calling for a tow truck, and most notably of all, opening fire on innocent civilians, which will result in the officer being immediately fired, aka an instant game over state. If you’re looking to go postal as a cop, you’ll probably find yourself disappointed with the end result here. District XP comparatively is far simpler. Successfully completing any objective will result in gaining XP, with the amount of XP granted often accurately reflecting the complexity of the task. Common easy tasks like ticketing those who litter will grant you a small amount of XP, but successfully apprehending a wanted criminal, or resolving a car accident dispute, will grant you significantly more. Would you rather grind lots of little tasks, or focus on fewer, higher rewarding tasks? The choice is yours, and you’ll be rewarded appropriately.
Even a full nine months after its initial early access launch, Police Simulator: Patrol Officers suffers from extremely noticeable performance issues. Despite testing it on both a Nvidia 2070 RTX powered desktop and a 3070 RTX laptop, there were many instances of framerate drops and even rare instances of stutter. This can be easily demonstrated when the player is about to enter an area of dense NPC population, or else entering or exiting a building such as one of the several available police stations.
Sounding off on the audio design
There’s really no other way to say it: the audio design here is wildly inconsistent. I’d hate to sound like the grinch, glaring down at the noise emanating from Whoville, but in many cases where I’d be sprinting around the city, and the player comes into an area filled with multiple sound sources, the game occasionally decides to blare a single noise obnoxiously loud, in a seemingly-bizarre attempt to drown out the rest. This can be anything from construction site sounds, to the sound of a heavy truck’s engine, to even an NPC you’re talking to. Their audio level would be mysteriously amplified several times over compared with what it normally would be. This is likely due to some programming issue and can likely be easily rectified, but for anyone wearing headphones, abandon all hope, ye who listen here.
Police Simulator: Patrol Officers is an enjoyable but fairly unremarkable simulation game that is held up in large part by its steady progression system and fairly extensive game mechanics, but is conversely held back by the lack of optimization, the sometimes unbearably-poor lighting system, and a series of other bugs affecting both the gameplay and the world design. While diehard simulation enthusiasts might get a kick out of the experience, casual players, or those on a tight budget, would likely instead benefit from holding off until the game reaches a more finished state.
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7.5
fun score
Pros
Open-world map that rewards exploration, decent variety of unlockable tools that can be used to alter your playstyle
Cons
Very little crime variety, inconsistent SFX quality and poor optismisation, occasional terrible NPC AI, especially when in a vehicle.
