Tsip Bato: Ang Bumangga Giba!, a game endorsed and co-developed by the Philippine National Police (PNP) itself, had more than 500,000 downloads before it was taken down from the Apple marketplace.

Launched on Aug. 8, 2016, just six weeks after President Rodrigo Duterte’s inauguration, Tsip Bato shows a cartoon PNP Chief Ronald Dela Rosa barreling through an endless highway and shooting criminals.

The PNP billed Tsip Bato an “entertaining and educational game” meant to teach children the dangers of doing drugs. The game features cartoonish acts of violence against drug suspects, with the avatars of Dela Rosa Duterte shown running over the suspects with a truck, gunning them down with an assault rifle, or blowing them up with a missile launcher.

The game was released when the administration’s drug was was just over a month old, and the police and unidentified gunmen were hunting down and killing scores of suspected drug users and dealers in Metro Manila’s poorest communities.

These games may seem harmless and fun out of context, said the 131 human rights and drug user rights groups that signed a petition against Tsip Bato and similar mobile apps. But set against the backdrop of the ongoing war on drugs – a war that’s seen, and continues to see, thousands murdered – the games take on a more sinister tone.

Tsip Bat­o, in particular, raises concerns for being a government-sponsored project, specifically in its purported goal of educating the youth on how to fight drugs in their communities. By focusing on killing, the game signals that extreme solutions are needed to fight the drug scourge. Wittingly or not, it justifies, and in the view of the games’ critics, also valorizes and normalizes the drug war killings.