A few years ago, I played a game called American Fugitive. It was a small, sandbox crime adventure game that was heavily inspired by the original Grand Theft Auto titles. More importantly, it was the first game of its kind from puzzle game developer Fallen Tree Games. Their new game, The Precinct, builds on that contained open-world formula while shifting the focus from a convicted criminal to a cop. In The Precinct, you play as Nick Cordell Jr, a new officer on the force that must climb the ranks, clean up the streets, and maybe even find out who killed the old police chief, Nick Cordell Sr.
Right from the opening credits, The Precinct establishes its 80s cop movie aesthetic with vaporware music and a deep-voiced narrator introducing you to Averno City. It’s easy to assume that the game is a typical RPG where you can create your own character and roam around dealing out justice, but there is a purposeful narrative here. All the named characters in the game are voiced, and there are visual novel-esque cutscenes that set the stage. Even though the cinematics are minimal, often just shifting the character art to the front when a given character is speaking, the result is still a narrative that feels like an episodic cop drama.
Part of what leads to that episodic feel is the shift-based nature of the game design. Every time you boot up the game, you will be starting a shift. These can range from on-foot patrol, where you will be dealing with vandals in back alleys and serving parking tickets, to in-car patrol, where you will be chasing down speeding cars and stopping shootouts. As you increase in rank, you will get new areas to patrol and new shifts to take up. Mechanically, the game is flexible, meaning you can play it in character and manually add each charge to every criminal you apprehend and bring them into the station yourself, or you can offload the paperwork to your NPC buddy, Kelly, and have a patrol car pick them up after an arrest so you can keep working.
Apart from keeping the streets clean, in each shift, you will be collecting evidence from crime scenes. These will either be standard evidence that will help you level up at the end of the shift, or gang-related evidence that is essential in bringing down the bosses of the two rivaling gangs in Averno City. Speaking of levelling up, as you do, you not only get new shift types and areas to patrol but also upgrade points that you can use to build out the simple but meaningful skill tree. By and large, I find that the game has enough depth across the board to be engaging yet not overwhelming, which strikes a nice balance.
That being said, I don’t think that the game is great for immersive roleplaying. For lack of a better term, the game has a bit too much jank undercutting the intensity. For example, I got off an intense chase with a criminal and had just forced them out of their car to apprehend them, and as I am in the process of arresting them, a rogue civilian car swerves into them and kills them. Now I lost all the XP from that arrest, and by the time I get to my patrol car and pursue the hit-and-runner, they’re long gone. There are also instances where cars flip in crazy ways if you hit a small object, and ragdolling into a fleeing suspect to stop them doesn’t exactly feel tactical. These are not inherently negative, but they make the game feel more like Police Squad than Heat, and you should know that going in.
Aside from dishing out justice, there are a few other things you can do around Averno to pass the time. There are races (marked with flags on the map), time trials (marked by stopwatches), jumps (marked by ramps), and artifacts to find. If you’re a trophy hunter, you’ll need to complete all of them to get the Platinum. From experience, I would recommend doing the optional activities throughout your playthrough and not saving them all for the end because it will get frustrating. The races especially highlight how frustrating the driving mechanics can be, with small nudges sending you or your opponents flying. Driving is fine when you’re doing your normal patrol for a shift, but in a race, at full speed, with racers slamming into you, it can grow tiresome.
There are some issues I have to address as well. Some of the dialogue is poorly mixed or recorded. Some of the aforementioned jank can lead to frustrating deaths, which can undo progress. And before I get to the biggest bug I had with the game, I also want to mention areas where I think the game could improve. The cutscenes look like visual novel sequences, but the textbox covers nearly half the screen. The game rarely takes up that whole area with text, and it feels like it’s wasted screen real estate. I also wish that Officer Kelly was a bit more proactive. There were numerous times when I would be taking on multiple perps, and Kelly would be stuck on an object or just standing around. I appreciate that he can do the paperwork for me, but being a bit more help on the field would be nice.
I played through the game on the PlayStation 5, and the performance, for the most part, is fine. The game doesn’t look jaw-dropping, and there aren’t many visual settings to tweak, but that’s also not to be expected with a game of this scale. I did mention the audio issue for the dialogue, but thankfully, that same thing doesn’t apply to the music, which features a nice selection of tracks that fit the tone well. Now it’s time to talk about my big bug. A few days ago, I booted up the game to finish it in time for this review (with over eight hours into my playthrough, I knew I was getting close), and I noticed that the option to continue the game was gone. When I selected the “Play Game” button, it simply started a whole new save. This was very disheartening, and a quick trip to the developer’s Twitter page revealed that this was a known issue with the (at the time) latest update on PlayStation 5.
At first, I thought I would have to review the game without experiencing the full narrative. Thankfully, a new update was pushed out two days later that not only patched the bug but also added a button that recovers lost saves. This allowed me to pick up roughly where I left off and finish the story. With the credits now rolled, I have some additional thoughts on the narrative. In the last hour or so of the game, Kelly’s role really shifts from NPC that tags along to a character that pushes the plot forward. This was nice to see, but I still wish that his character had been built out more consistently throughout.
The story does take a few turns at the end, and some of it was interesting. I won’t (obviously) spoil that here. However, it still feels like the game is in two parts. On one hand, they’re trying to tell an interesting police story with a lot of noir influence. Although that story leaves a lot to be desired and ends before you can get too invested. On the other hand, it’s a police simulator that lets you work different shifts and get a risk-free taste of law enforcement. That being said, the frequent quirks impede immersion. And a last point about the story: while I get why it’s done mechanically, the game builds toward an event with Kelly for a majority of the game and then backs out of it after you beat the game. Which also leads to the unsatisfying conclusion.
Now comes the rating. Much like the game’s design, I too was conflicted on how to approach the score for this game. It was mostly fun to play, but for a game so intent on telling a story, with a cast of characters, voice acting, and a protagonist whose history is so firmly at the center of it all, it just didn’t quite hit the mark for me. That being said, if the game’s shift-based gameplay loop is what you’re looking for or the game just happens to be on sale, it is still worth checking out. The Precinct is available now on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. A review code was provided by the publisher.
