Welcome to our review of This Is The Police 2, a noir drama meets simulation about running a sheriffs department. But it’s not just a Sims on Cops expansion, no sir/madam – it’s much, much more! But I don’t know if that’s such a good thing..
Having never played the first part of the game, I had a hard time getting into the story. So I decided to read up a little to make myself more accustomed with the story behind the game. Jack Boyd, the main protagonist from the first game is on the run. Through a series of flashbacks and letters you can puzzle together what happened after he left Freeburg. While the story unfolds in the background, you must manage the department, the cops, investigate and interrogate and even make tough decisions.
The story of Sharpwood
Sharpwood is a small town, riven with violence, which puts a lot of pressure on your cops. Every day you pick cops for shifts, but of course they have needs, a family and other pressing matters. So will you grant them the one free day, and let the potential murder victim escape the scene since you didn’t have the right cop assigned? After completing a mission, you can level up a cop and even buy some new equipment to make the jobs they do easier.
THQ describes Sharpwood as following:
Welcome to Sharpwood, where people know their neighbours by name and faithfully keep to their traditions, no matter how barbaric those traditions might be. Smugglers, gangs, and screaming populists call this town their home. Despair grows like a cancer, hand in hand with violence. It’s a hell of a job for the new sheriff, Lilly Reed (voiced by Sarah Hamilton, of the celebrated adventure saga The Longest Journey). She’s struggling to maintain order and peace, while her subordinates are uncouth men who aren’t used to taking commands from a young woman. But everything changes when a mysterious stranger calling himself Warren Nash appears in Sharpwood. And no one knows what he’ll bring to the town: salvation or perdition.
This Is The Police 2 – Elephants:
Let’s start with the elephant in the room. THQ gives us a mixture of gameplay styles. Is it a adventure game, a strategy game? A simulator? A visual novel? Well, I don’t know how to label it, and that’s what’s bugging me. It feels random. It goes from one side of the story to the other, and it feels like I’m playing a bad game of Mario Party. One turn I’m running around the board, chasing stars, but for the next four turns I only get to play minigames with no real purpose. While doing missions on the map, some of them turn out to be false alarms. Yes, I get that’s part of the job, but making me fail the one that was important by giving me three false alarm missions is just .. wrong. I never had the feeling I really passed a mission or investigation. There was no real purpose behind it. And if you don’t have the feeling of accomplishment, why bother playing through more of the minute-long cinematics (which can be even more random).
Copclusion:
So if you can look past the randomness, you’ll get a nice looking game, with great voice acting and a good story. But it really is a string of random encounters put together by a nicely drawn story. The movies are sometimes really long and really interrupt the flow of the game. I had high hopes for this one, but really couldn’t get into it. Maybe if you have a cop background, you’ll find this entertaining and spend all of your leisure time into creating the perfect American sheriffs department, it wasn’t my cup of tea.
