This Is the Police

This Is the Police is a management-heavy strategy game about running a city police department, and the appeal is the constant pressure of choosing where limited officers go. By our assessment, its best trick is how it turns paperwork, schedules, and ugly calls into the whole game loop instead of background noise. The trade-off is that the pace can feel grim and tightly scripted, because the player spends a lot of time in menus and triage rather than in dramatic action. In practice it plays like an unhappy desk job with consequences, which is exactly why it works. It sits closer to resource management and moral-balancing games than to power fantasies about policing, and that makes it more specific than its title suggests. The players who usually get the most from it are the ones who enjoy juggling shortages and bad choices; people wanting freeform tactics or heroic action will bounce off the routine and the mood.