Sir Robert Peel, seen by some as the father of modern policing, once famously said “The police are the public, and the public are the police”. Well, now Weappy, in partnership with Team 17, have released “This is the Police”, and now the public really can have a crack at being the police, and see how they measure up to the standards they demand of the thin blue line.

So let’s dive in. First impressions of “This is the Police” are truly excellent. Just the title screen drips atmosphere and tone. A jazz soundtrack, all muted trumpets and tinkling pianos, immediately conjures images of hazy late-night city streets, of steel bridges and concrete pillars, of detectives and dames. It’s perhaps misleading, as once you start playing it quickly becomes apparent that this game is definitely not set in the 1920’s of noir-era crime fiction, but the feel is there nevertheless and evoked skilfully.

Alongside this excellent soundtrack, a bold but rather beautiful visual style renders everything as striking still images, really just colours and shapes, with almost no detailing at all. It perfectly fits a world where everything open to interpretation, nothing clear. It’s notable that you almost never see faces in this game, everyone is just blank. It makes it hard to judge intentions, deliberately so, leaving everything up to the player to decide.

The game sets up the story in a series of long, and somewhat meandering little sequences of images, accompanied by a voice-over from Jon St Jon explaining the player’s wretched circumstances: You are Jack Boyd, 60 year old chief of police. You are being forced into retirement in six months’ time. That gives you 180 days to embezzle half a million pounds into your retirement fund, your final act of revenge and defiance against a city (and more importantly, a city hall) that has rejected you.

Gameplay is simple, but effectively delivered. Each day you are greeted with a map of the city, and as time passes, police calls appear on this map. Click the call, read the description, and then decide how many, if any, of your officers you are going to dispatch to it. Some are obviously false alarms, others obviously serious, but you still need to keep your wits about you, and ideally keep one eye on what will happen next. If you send most of your force to quell the mass brawl that has broken out in the park, who will be left to send to the armed robbery that pops up a few minutes later? Do you gamble that the city will stay quiet for a few hours, or do you risk sending an undermanned team into a dangerous situation? Is that bomb threat at the elementary school a real thing, or just some kids playing a practical joke? Can you afford to send people to go and find out? Can you afford the consequences if you don’t, and it’s real?

These decisions are wonderful – exciting, tense and intriguing. Your heart really does beat faster as you let a timer tick down on a job you have chosen to ignore. You may be reasonably sure it’s a false alarm, but that “what if” scenario plagues you. It’s not too late, you could still click it, still send people to check it out…

This tension is hugely increased by some genuinely cruel consequences for failure. A bad day on the job, a few too many bodies in the morgue at the end of a shift, and you will be greeted the next morning by a message from the Mayor cutting your funding. Now you have to choose which member of staff you are going to fire. It’s merciless, perhaps unfairly so, but it certainly gives those on the job decisions a real sense of consequence.

Unfortunately, over time, this knife-edge thrill gives way to a steadily growing sense of frustration. A few too many bad days can see you undermanned to the point where it’s simply impossible to keep control of the city. One officer who doesn’t show up to work his shift, and then one bad hour in the city, and you are truly stuffed. If two large events occur simultaneously and you don’t have the staff to cover both, you can find the situation quickly runs away from you. A snowballing staffing crisis becomes an avalanche of rough days, each subsequent shift giving you less and less resources, helplessly trying to solve a now-impossible puzzle. To earn more slots for officers, you need to get some good days under your belt, but to have a good day you really need more staff on your roster already. You can ask your least-tired men to work double shifts, which alleviates the problem to some extent, but if you aren’t careful you can, and will, end up in a spiral of failure that cannot be escaped, forcing either a full restart of the campaign (which is not a small undertaking, as the full campaign weighs in at 40 hours or so) or some shameless save-scumming to salvage the situation, memorising the crimes that happen when, allowing you to distribute your officers with psychic precision.

But then there’s the other big problem with the game, and really, it’s the elephant in the room for any game about modern policing in the current climate. Issues around the use of lethal force, the way in which race plays a role in law enforcement tactics, the ongoing militarisation of police forces around the world – these are all topics that are unavoidably present in any game with this setting. This is the Police deals with these issues in a way that can best be described as “tone-deaf”, and strays quite heavily into being outright offensive.

For example, imagine that you are a game developer making a police procedural style game, right now. Perhaps you’ve been working on it for a while, but as release day approaches, so too a difficult, complex conversation starts up in the media around race and policing. The Black Lives Matter movement starts up, and the television news is suddenly awash with video footage of unarmed young black men being killed, apparently without provocation or justification.

Now imagine that the first major event in your game is the Mayor’s office instructing the player to “fire all your black police officers”. Would you change this?

I think I would, but then I found a lot of things here that I would do differently. The script in this game is oftentimes clumsy, sometimes outright poor, but also sometimes dangerously close to outright racism. The writing is peppered with ugly phrases, such as frequent use of the phrase“the blacks” to refer to a whole section of the city. That’s not overtly offensive, I suppose, but it certainly is troubling, suggesting a writer who doesn’t have enough understanding or awareness to be sailing in these treacherous waters. The crime descriptions obsessively and unfailing mention the ethnicity of every perpetrator, and this seems very odd. There’s no gameplay reason why you need to know that the burglar you arrested is black, or Chinese, or whatever, but the game makes sure you know, every single time. This kind of odd detail means that as you play, you can’t help but wonder what’s really going on in the minds of the developers. It becomes a real question of trust. How confident are you, as the player, that the developers who made this game aren’t harbouring sordid opinions that have leaked out into the game itself? It’s a question that becomes harder and harder to answer as you play, as the uncomfortable moments stack up.

At first contact, I was prepared to give the benefit of the doubt over a lot of things. I forgave the odd mis-step here and there as mere clumsy writing. A fellow writer for this site suggested that perhaps leaving that racial cleansing task in at the start of the game was brave, rather than foolhardy, and I hoped he was right, and that the game was heading somewhere, that it was going to blossom out into a bold take on a difficult question. But as time went on, as I trudged deeper into the game, I felt my trust eroding further with each in-game day that passed. Many times… Far, far too many times, I found myself looking cock-eyed at the screen and wondering what exactly I was playing.

What was the final straw for me? Was it the first (but certainly not only) time the game offered me a “hilarious” joke option for how to deal with a naked and bloodied rape victim? Was it when I chose a dialogue option labelled “Caution couldn’t hurt” at a press conference, and then listened to Jack Boyd lecture the women of the city on the safety benefits of modest dress and not wearing make-up? Perhaps it was when my character comes face to face with a man who has (indirectly) killed six women, their corpses mutilated with a power drill post-mortem, and then lets him walk away without batting an eyelid, in a narrative beat that the writer obviously meant as just another shade of grey in a murky world? Maybe it was the growing realisation that the best way to keep my officers safe on calls seemed to always be shooting first and asking questions later, to meet every situation with overwhelming force? Or was it the breathtakingly ill-judged torture mechanic that was suddenly introduced about 20 hours into the game, presenting me with a dingy basement wall covered in blood-stained tools and car batteries, alongside an on-screen prompt urging me to select the one I thought would be most effective in extracting a confession from the 17 year old boy who moments earlier had been shown on-screen cowering in the corner of his cell, curled up in the fetal position, sobbing? Oh yeah… that would be the one…

I refused to torture the boy and the game responded by telling me I had failed the case. A failure which naturally led to another cut in my funding, putting me straight back into the failure spiral I had only just escaped from.

On Facebook, the lead developer has preemptively posted a long and meandering defence of his product, in which he claims that this game is not a story about race, or religion or gender, it’s a game about humans. It’s not a game set in the US, it’s really in some vague symbolic pseudo-country. It exists outside of modern politics, so shouldn’t be held accountable to them. Frankly, reading it made me wish if I could discuss it further with him, but only if I had a dingy basement wall of tools available to me. The statement is the most cowardly, mealy-mouthed opt-out of a difficult conversation I’ve seen in a long time, a run for cover in the face of the obvious problems with his game, hiding from the issues rather than actually deal with them.

It’s also an almost entirely dishonest response. Claiming a game in which City Hall repeatedly orders the player to violently suppress political protests isn’t about politics is like claiming Mario games aren’t about jumping or collecting coins. The developer also says the game doesn’t seek to represent real world events, which seems strange given that one of the calls I dealt with in the game was a 10 year old boy named Ahmed accused of bringing a bomb into school that turned out to be a homemade clock. Best of all, the claim that the game isn’t set in America is truly beyond contempt, barely worth rebutting at all. No rational human being could look at the setting, tone and language of this game and not immediately place themselves in the United States? As defences go, I don’t think this one is going to hold up in court.

Perhaps most tellingly, This is the Police is a game filled with many metrics by which you can measure your success or failure, but crucially, one is missing. You can see how the Mayor feels about you, you can see how the Mafia feel about you, later on you can even gauge the loyalty of your own officers, but the one group of people in the game whose feelings you cannot scrutinise, whose feelings do not factor into the simulation at all, are the civilians in your city. You never hear from them, they are just bystanders, victims, potential perps, but ultimately they are wholly unimportant to your quest, rendered entirely voiceless by a game that simply does not care about them.

Over time, the game conditions you to go in hard and heavy in every situation, and take what you want by brute force It ruthlessly enforces this behaviour with the threat of a savage punishment. A cruel master, the game will dangle your 20+ hours of play up so far in front of you, threatening to destroy it if you don’t toe the line and do whatever grim task it now demands of you. It claims to offer the player a choice, but the choice it really offers is to dive headfirst into the ethical cesspit before you, or stop playing entirely as your tools to enjoy the game are steadily stripped away from you. Whether this is system is accident or design I ultimately cannot speculate, but it means that “This is the Police” has a central message that is truly unpleasant. In this game’s world, might is right, victims only have themselves to blame, the ends justify the means and the only solution to complex problems is an iron fist with an iron will. In keeping with this ideology, if you attempt to argue with these principles, if you try to carve your own path through the difficulties it presents, it crushes you ruthlessly until you either start doing what it wants, or stop entirely.

I made many choices whilst playing This is the Police, but perhaps the most sensible one I took during my time with it was to sadly shake my head, close it down, and quietly uninstall it.

This is the Police was provided to us for review via a download code for PC by Dead Good Media PR.