When you think about open-world games, it’s hard not to think about L.A. Noire – none have dealt with the minutia of being a police officer. With The Precinct, developer Fallen Tree Games has tackled that concept. And while it’s an interesting and unique take on the formula, it’s not without its faults.
Inspired by cop dramas of the late eighties and nineties, The Precinct sees you step into the shoes of Nick Cordell. A rookie cop fresh out of the academy, Nick is looking to make his mark on the Averno City Police Department following the unfortunate death of his father while on the beat. As the game opens, you’ll set out on your patrols to take care of the simple things – parking tickets, muggings and vandalism. But as The Precinct progresses, you’ll uncover and unravel the truth behind all of the criminal organisations in the city and perhaps even learn a bit about the circumstances surrounding your father’s death.
The Precinct’s influences are immediately apparent – this feels like the classic Grand Theft Auto games in many ways. But The Precinct’s greatest influence also, ironically, differentiates it from Rockstar’s gargantuan criminal enterprise franchise. In The Precinct, you’re playing as a cop, and the main crux of the gameplay lies in thwarting petty and grand crime to clean up the streets of Averno City. It’s an interesting twist on the formula, and while games like 2009’s COP: The Recruit and even LEGO City: Undercover have flirted with the idea, none of them feel as well realised as The Precinct.
And while those games play with humour, especially LEGO City, The Precinct delicately toes the line between camp and cringe. The dialogue is especially hammy, and the characters feel more like caricatures than real people. Whenever people spoke, I’d want to skip the hokey dialogue to get out onto my patrols, where most of The Precinct’s appeal lies.
The main gameplay loop has you selecting a patrol zone and a shift to work in the city. During these shifts, you’ll have a general objective – issuing parking tickets or apprehending speeding drivers, for example – and you’ll have to patrol your route and track down criminals at any opportunity. These feel randomised – I can’t be sure if they definitely are – so how productive you are in each shift can vary. But the better you do, the more experience you receive with bonuses awarded by sticking to protocol, using appropriate force where necessary, and simply addressing as many crimes as possible.
Where things get interesting is when The Precinct throws everything at you. There were many times when I would look forward to a leisurely shift, issuing parking tickets and concluding my shift. But instead, following just one shift of a few minutes, I’d thwarted a mugging attempt, some vandalism and chased down a drug dealer across a busy highway. You feel pulled in all directions when you’re on your shift, and it’s up to you which crimes you respond to. I found an odd amount of joy in trying to balance all the needs of the people in the area, though at the same time, I found myself deflated if I couldn’t help everyone.
When apprehending criminals or suspects, you can check their ID and search their person or vehicle. Following this, depending on what you find out, you can select from a list of offences the person has committed before processing them and returning them to the Precinct. It scratches an itch similar to games like Papers, Please or Death And Taxes, though if you’re not somebody who cares for that aspect of management, then you can humorously “delegate the paperwork” to your partner. How well you select what crimes people do rewards you with more experience.
Experience can be used to unlock upgrades for Nick on a very simplistic skill tree, allowing you to commandeer vehicles besides your own and call in different types of when pursuing a suspect. It’s a simple skill tree that’s so simple to the point where I don’t know why it’s here, especially when some of the things on the skill tree feel like they should be standard in a game like this anyway, but it at least provides good if not brief incentive to be a better cop in each of the shifts you carry out.
While you’re out on your patrol, you’ll come across evidence, too, and this is essentially how the game’s story progresses. Evidence is examined at the end of each day and “banked”, and banking a certain amount of proof will unlock a mission for you to go and take down a key member in the gang you’re investigating. This is a great and organic way to fuel the main story progression in the game, and the missions themselves are set pieces that pay great homage to the over-the-top spectacle of eighties cop films.
Though these moments are often where you’ll be in combat and, unfortunately, where The Precinct falls a little flat. Controlling like a twin-stick shooter, many of the combat encounters feel rather drab. While there are different weapons to unlock, they all behave somewhat similarly. For another, almost every combat encounter feels simplistic – you’ll merely stand there, wait for someone to pop out of cover, shoot, and then move forward. Some more complex AI would do wonders here to keep the encounters dynamic, but for now, The Precinct’s combat is easily its second weakest aspect.
Which brings me to the weakest aspect – the overall gameplay loop. While The Precinct is novel on a conceptual level, in practice, it falls flat to one crucial factor – it’s somewhat repetitive, and the novelty wears off quickly. I can envision a particular type of player engaging with the repetitive nature of the game’s objectives, but it does mean the pacing of the game feels off. There is not enough objective variety here to keep things interesting along the main story path.
Though your mileage may vary, as The Precinct will take most players around ten to twelve hours to roll credits. If you are one of those aforementioned players who would find comfort in the monotony of the game’s criminal apprehensions, you can even free roam the world too, allowing the dispatch calls to come through for as long as you can bear. But despite my issues with The Dispatch’s repetition, I didn’t feel short-changed.
Putting aside my issues with the gameplay, it’s hard to argue that The Dispatch’s presentation is anything but slick. While presented from an isometric perspective, the game’s grimy aesthetic perfectly captures the essence of a crime-laden town in the eighties. It’s especially good looking at night, where the neon-lit cityscape reflects perfectly off puddles on the road. It really feels like an isometric, slightly lo-fi Cyberpunk, and is an immersive well-realised setting with a great sense of time and place. Performance was strong, though there were some drops here and there when the going got tough.
The music is similarly incredible, if not slightly generic, using synthy jazz to set the scene of the era from which these inspirations hailed. While I adored the soundtrack, I feel it would be better suited to a setting more reminiscent of Miami, though perhaps the team didn’t want to invite comparisons to a certain blockbuster releasing next year. Still, it’s nice to walk the streets of Averno to these moody synthy tracks, just waiting for your next crime to pop up.
While I sound down on The Precinct, it’s an enjoyable experience. There is something oddly satisfying and novel about playing on the other side of the oft-imitated Grand Theft Auto formula. But while all the building blocks are here for what I hope will become a franchise for developer Fallen Tree Games, it just feels like those blocks haven’t been put together in the best way.
