What’s The Precinct about?

You start off as the new rookie Officer Nick Cordell Jr in Averno City, son of the dead chief of police Cordell. You start off been mentored by another officer who takes you out on the streets showing you the ropes and giving you tutorials on what crimes are happening and what you can arrest or not arrest for and you get to learn the different regions that you must patrol or do your beat on. You get to either walk the beat on foot, use your patrol car for vehicle ,missions and you can also use the helicopter for those aerial type missions. So your shift starts and you pick which patrol that if offered to you by your shift commander and head out. You gain XP at the end of your shift by how many arrests and fines you issue which allow you to “unlock” additional power ups and weapons etc.

What’s the gameplay and controls like?

The Precinct is a top-down title that features on foot and driving gameplay with some flying also, the game controls vary depending which beat you are doing. The foot beat has you controlling your character with a few options like sprinting and jumpi9ng over fences and walls with a main button for talking to NPCs or activating an action prompt. The camera angles can swing and confuse you sometimes but you do get used to it. The dialogue in the game furthers the story onwards in a cartoon storyboard type interval between missions or beats with solid enough audio dialogue from voice actors. You also get to investigate fellow officers to see if they’re dirty and arrest them also when needed. You find yourself just running, driving and at times flying around the city arresting perps for petty crimes so you can score as much XP as possible but i did find it getting boring pretty quickly as it seemed most crimes were duplicated a lot or pretty similar and it became a chore of same ole same ole. The shooting can vary depending on the weapons and sometime i felt like i was just not hitting anything, while my cursor was locked on to the enemies.

How does the game look graphically?

The game is said to be using the Unity engine and graphically looks ok, but is not going to really push your hardware, PC or console. While there are plenty of cars on the streets, there are not so many NPCs and animations and driving can be hit or miss. The night missions look better with the night lights and better if it’s a wet day.

2-3 hours of gameplay can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amwteDIwzfU

How’s the progression and replay ability?

You start off with low level policing like giving parking tickets or speeding tickets and earn XP depending on what crime it is and can do checks on civilians and find out if they have pending charges or have hidden drugs or weapons on them. The move XP and missions you complete, you unlock new weapons or additional perks. You get after a while, a crime boss tree that you must work your way through by completing missions dedicated to that boss in that area hoping to get enough evidence to find the big boss and arrest them.

You get to use perk points to boost your skills depending on which activity in the precinct you are doing like driving or on the beat. This can be unlocking a new weapon slot or increasing your ammo count. More powerful weapons like the shotgun or rifle can be unlocked later on that will help with missions with more enemies further throughout the game.

Conclusion

I really wanted to get into The Precinct but i found myself getting bored pretty quickly with it’s gameplay and almost procedurally generated missions that were too similar most the time and i found myself just busting civilians to get my XP up as quick as i could and it felt like a chore and not fun. The progression wasn’t very intuitive and just became a unlock without even wanting to see what it done there was so little of them. While the premise of the game is good, i just feel that it just didn’t get it right.