This Is the Police released for Linux, some thoughts on this intriguing strategy and adventure game

Our friends at GOG sent over a copy of This Is the Police to take a look at. I hadn't heard much about it before, but it looks stylish so I decided to give it a go.

Disclosure: If it wasn't obvious enough from the intro, the key was provided by GOG.com directly.

First thing to note for multi-screen users: for me it started on the wrong screen, but putting it into windowed mode and then back to fullscreen while on my main screen sorted that fine. Slightly annoying, but easily fixable.

It's a stylised story-focused game that starts off quite weirdly as you enter some sort of private "gentleman's club" (a strip club) as an old police officer. I have literally no idea what's going on, but the voice work is great. I love the style the game is presented in an almost comic strip like form.

You're essentially playing out the last few months (180 days) as the chief of police, you are constantly presented with choices and those choices affect how you play out the story. It's a very cool idea, in fact, the whole game is just really cool to play as an old chief of police.


While it has a fair amount of talking and stylish cut-scenes, it also has the strategy element to it with you assigning officers, dealing with crime and attending to calls and messages. You need to keep an eye on the skill level of officers, how tired they are and so on.

Everything is presented in a really easy to grasp way which is another reason why I like it. Being stylish and having good voice work is one thing, but over-complicating a game is another, thankfully This Is the Police is a breeze to understand and get going.

Everything that happens can affect your officers skill. I sent out two really crap officers for a "hit and run", sadly the offender escaped which brought down the skill level of one officer to give you an example of the type of thing you deal with.

Naturally your officers may sometimes need a bit of help deciding what to do, so they call in and it's your choice what they do:

I was able to sneak in and arrest the offenders in question, and my officers gained skill points.

The only thing I don't like is the checkpoint save system. You don't get to save the game whenever you like. It appears each day is a new save. I always get frustrated by checkpoint-only saves, so that's the only mark against the game in my personal opinion.

It's a very cool idea, very well presented, fantastic voice work and something I think you need to check out if you like story-focused people management games.

You can find This Is the Police on GOG and Steam. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.