I’m glad I don’t live in Averno City, the setting of Fallen Tree Games’ The Precinct. In the two hours I spent patrolling its streets, crime was everywhere. Speeding is rampant, vandals are around every corner, and it seems like everyone is carrying an illegal firearm and likes to drink and drive. As a rookie cop, it’s up to you to crack down on this crime wave and return your town to relative safety.
Presented from a semi-top-down perspective, you’ll spend most of your time in The Precinct exploring the city on foot or behind the wheel. You could be on traffic duty, giving tickets for poor parking or speeding, or on a walking beat where you’ll break up fights or stop burglaries. You’ll start by speaking to the suspect before searching them and deciding which – if any – crimes to charge them with. Finally, you’ll send them back to the precinct for sentencing.
It may be an obvious comparison, but there are a lot of similarities between The Precinct and LA Noire, Rockstar and Team Bondi’s ambitious detective game, including the way you slowly, methodically cruise around the city, question suspects, and begin your day from a familiar meeting room. While set almost half a century later, the pace and tone of ’80s police life in The Precinct make it feel like a spiritual successor to Cole Phelps’ noir adventure.
Heading out on your beat is fun from the jump. Scanning a suspicious-looking car’s license plate to see if it’s stolen only to find drugs and weapons stashed in the back is the sort of high-intensity escalation you can expect to face. You have to remain on your toes at all times.
Do you question the suspect about the crime you’ve stopped them for, run their ID, and search them to ascertain whether a more serious crime is at hand? Or is time not on your side? Deciphering the optimal way to deal with each person and situation is a neat puzzle.
You’re then scored at the end of every interaction, giving you XP for following best practices and identifying crimes correctly. That said, you’ll be penalized for anything you miss or get wrong. It’s a tight system that pushes you to be across all the details. Missing a small amount of dubious cash isn’t a disaster, but failing to confiscate an illegal assault rifle might not reflect well on you. Simple stuff.
Sadly, the thrill and intensity of these moments starts to wane after you fall into a numbing loop of IDing the suspect, checking if they’re drunk, searching for anything nefarious, and then charging them.
You’ll soon arrest the same people for the same crimes in the same way, sometimes multiple times per day. Even if the crimes differ, the process seldom changes, and it becomes something you can do on autopilot. Plus, the characters you interact with are never unique enough to keep the mechanical simplicity from growing mundane. That repetition also extends to the visual variety of NPCs and cars, which you’ll see duplicates of time and again in close proximity. It all starts to chip away at the city’s believability.
The Precinct does occasionally flex its muscles. The story focuses on the town’s police force and their battle against the local gangs. In more story-focused sections, you’ll enter linear missions to take on groups of bad guys or stop more substantial crimes.
You’ll engage in car chases, jump into shootouts in surprisingly strong third-person combat, and tackle mob bosses, which is all infinitely more exciting than handing out parking tickets. In the game’s early hours, the story sections are frequent enough that it’s easy to feel invested.
I’m also curious to see how The Precinct’s upgrade system opens up different approaches and playstyles. Skills include combat buffs and improved investigative abilities. Rather than making the game’s slower section even more simple or repetitive, I hope these upgrades add extra complexity to the later game.
I also hope the consistent jank is fixed before launch, which currently includes friendly cops shooting suspects through your back while you talk to them, NPC cars crashing into anything in their way, and tackled suspects going wild with strange ragdoll physics.
Exploring Averno City and interacting with its many criminals is great at first. The process of working out what you can charge someone with is well-designed, and the story seems intriguing, but after just two short hours with The Precinct, I was beginning to tire of it. Hopefully, the full sandbox game ramps up the complexity a little. In a city with crime levels this bad, being a police officer shouldn’t be so easy.