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The year is 1983 and we’re tasked with stopping crime in a fictitious US metropolis while getting to the bottom of a conspiracy.
The Precinct is available today for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. In addition to a digital version on Steam, the PlayStation Store and the Xbox Store, a Limited Edition is also in stores for both consoles for €39.99, which includes the game on disc, a map of Averno City, a steelbook and the digital soundtrack. The game was developed by Fallen Tree Games (American Fugitive) and published by Kwalee (Wildmender).
At the beginning of the 10- to 12-hour game, we take on the role of young officer Nick Cordell Jr., joining the Averno City Police Department. Here, we are tasked not only with thwarting various misdemeanors and crimes while on patrol, but also with dismantling two gangs, solving the murder plot against our late father, the former Chief of Police, and a series of gruesome murders. We are able to go on patrol on foot, by car and later even by helicopter. Little by little, we unlock new districts and missions. Within these districts, we can move freely and participate in randomly generated events. However, if we complete our main task, we’ll earn extra experience points, which we can use to unlock new skills and weapons.
On patrol, we issue tickets for illegally parked cars, pull over speeding drivers, secure accident scenes, suppress black market and drug deals and stop gang shootouts. The camer is similar to Fallen Tree Games’ previous game, American Fugitive, or the classic Grand Theft Auto (GTA) games. We can tilt, zoom and rotate the camera up to a certain point. On patrol, we talk to witnesses and identify suspects, search them and subject them to breathalyzer tests, as well as list and punish their individual offenses – misdemeanors with a fine and felonies with an arrest. Alternatively, we can let the game handle this for us, with the suspects being transported by an escort unit. Broken or illegally parked cars can’t be towed away like in Police Simulator: Patrol Officers. Suspects have a blue bar for mental health below their red life bar. If we yell at them often enough, they’ll eventually give up, except for the most vicious ones.
Although we can turn off the police radio and focus on our main task—such as stopping drug-related crime—random events keep occurring, which the game struggles with at times. The objective can change automatically, preventing us from fully completing the previous task—such as interviewing witnesses or searching suspects. Fortunately, we can also call for backup, which is mostly helpful—from a foot patrol over a patrol car to a helicopter. To acquire additional forces, we have to fill a bar by staying close during chases, which quickly depletes if we get stuck in Averno City’s dense traffic. Attending optional time challenges (checkpoint races against the clock) and illegal street races, in which we can earn experience points, provide variety, but the artificial intelligence (AI) is far too aggressive and the arcade-like driving physics can be a bit frustrating. The same applies to gunfights: While one of the upgrades allows us to fire accurately while driving, even with an assault rifle, thanks to auto-aim, fighting on foot is a bit clunky and especially while trying to find cover, we repeatedly found ourselves jumping over barricades and dying in a hail of bullets. Some fine-tuning is still needed here, but fortunately, the game saves quite frequently.
Partner AI has bigger issues: Our soon-to-retire colleague fancies to run away or he will suddenly open fire on peaceful suspects—apparently the energy gather of the hot dogs you can buy on various food stands suddenly kicked in. It’s often better to do everything yourself, such as catching and arresting a shoplifter, only to then turn our attention to the other one. After we’ve been out of range of the first suspect for a short time, he’s automatically declared to have fled, which causes us to lose experience points. This also happens if, during a wild chase, we lightly touch a stolen car whose driver is literally firing on all cylinders—”illegal ramming.” Other point deductions are more sensible, e.g. when we let a suspicious person pull over during a general traffic stop and test their alcohol level without having any indication of drunk-driving before we’ve checked their driver’s license and vehicle registration.
The controls are quite intuitive, apart from the somewhat clunky gunplay with a controller. Even the helicopter controls, which can be pretty wonky in many games, are decent. We have to keep the suspects in the cone of our searchlight and thus fill up the aforementioned bar in order to request support, including spike strips and roadblocks. The automatic placement of these barriers is not always comprehensible, however, and the AI police prefer to slam into traffic for effect rather than take out the criminals. In our version, there were still problems displaying the helicopter’s rotor blades correctly. The different cars differ noticeably in their handling. There’s a variety of different police cars available, such as an all-wheel vehicle and a station wagon, but the standard car is easily the recommended police vehicle, as the others are simply far too slow. With an upgrade, we can confiscate any vehicle we want in GTA-style and thus drive considerably faster. In The Precinct, we carve our own path thanks to largely destructible environments, which the gangsters also frequently make use of.
Over the course of the game, we gather clues to bring two rival gangs to justice. To do this, we must work our way up the gang hierarchy to identify and arrest the leading members, all the way to the bosses. Furthermore, we are repeatedly called to crime scenes where a mysterious serial killer is on the loose, executing various criminals in explicit manner. We can complete this task even after the credits roll in a kind of New Game+. With experience points, we unlock upgrades such as larger magazines, a higher firing rate, more robust vehicles and quick-time events to quickly regenerate stamina while sprinting. Our equipment includes a revolver, baton, taser, shotgun, Cantius rifle, AK-47, M16 and a machine pistol, as well as a fire extinguisher, which we can use to prevent burning cars from exploding. With the unlockable Artifact Tracker, we can find the at times macabre exhibits stolen from a museum much more easily after solving riddles to open the locked boxes they’re kept in.
Averno City is generally quite diverse, with a vibrant Chinatown district, a downtown area teeming with pedestrians and the Projects, where drug trafficking flourishes and where we wished we could use wiretaps like in the HBO series The Wire. On the busy highways surrounding the two islands that make up the city, we can even take speed measurements from the helicopter. However, just like in real police work, on some patrols there’s barely anything happening, or things repeat themselves over and over again, which can make the game a bit of a drag over time. Dynamic weather and a day/night cycle add to the game’s realism.
In the few cutscenes, while the character artworks break somewhat with the game’s graphic style, the dialogues are professionally voiced with a thick New York accent. During the somewhat long drives, which can be shortened by fast travel via the subway, we can’t engage in idle chatter with our partner. There’s also no radio, however, our patrols through Averno City are accompanied by Synthwave music that fits the game’s neo-noir style and ’80s setting. The Precinct ran smoothly on our test systems equipped with GeForce RTX 4070 and RTX 4080 Laptop GPU at the maximum details in 1440p and with minor graphical downgrades in 4K without any crashes. It also supports AMD’s upscaler FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) in its third iteration, although not Nvidia’s equivalent Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). Even with the integrated AMD Radeon 780M graphics unit, the game runs in Full HD with high details using FSR3 at a stable 30 frames per second. Additionally, a handheld graphics profile with a 30 FPS lock is available, but it offers lower graphical quality than our settings. For a potentially significant FPS boost, we recommend lowering the lighting quality.
Final thoughts
Fallen Tree Games switched sides from American Fugitive to The Precinct successfully and crafted an entry-friendly police simulator. While we quickly unlock new areas and upgrades and learn to optimize our handling of crimes, we are often caught off guard by the at times unpredictable behavior of the AI and elements of our current mission being aborted. If the developers can get these inconsistencies under control, we can recommend The Precinct to all fans of police simulators like Police Simulator: Patrol Officers or Autobahn Polizei Simulator – following the still choppy and buggy Highway Police Simulator, The Precinct is a beacon of hope in the genre.
The Precinct was provided to us by Kwalee for the PC. We took the screenshots using this version.
