What started as a littering citation ended in a fiery inferno. The Academy never prepared Nick Cordell for this. He stuffed the two suspects into a cop car, where a cop sat in the front seat, ready to take them away. Then he went for the riot van. Drove the massive rig back and forth over the cop car, crunching its body, until it caught fire. The suspected gang members and the cop were burnt to a crisp. All this after a long chase sequence involving helicopters, more than a few police cruisers, spike strips, and exchanges of gunfire. All over some debris thrown out of a car window. They won’t be littering anymore.
The true measure of an open world game may be what kind of psychopath the game allows you to be. Whom amongst us is more psychopathic than the police?
Cordell’s next incident went different. Fleeing the scene, after the game restarted him for the killing a police officer, Cordell ran towards the bridge and found an encampment of tents with some men passed out along its lower wall. Checked all of their IDs, searched them for drug paraphernalia and stolen merchandise. Each one had either a pending case, narcotics, or made a run for it. Nick let them go. Look, it’s not that one good apple can unspoil the bunch, but it’s a profound thought, that in open world games where we often maim and kill indiscriminately, that when stepping into a role we do not necessarily respect, like a police officer, we can make a more discerning choice. Cordell’s patrol partner Sergeant Kelly gave chase to the last unhoused man who had priors for burglary. No, decided Cordell, this moment is about redemption. Let him go. He must have needed what he stole. He called his partner off, then proceeded up the bridge back to the precinct.
Back at the precinct, Nick is rewarded for his bravery in service, with the ability to absorb more bullets. Bulletproof vests, apparently, only go to cops who make their quotas. That’s the way it goes with this precinct, Nick knows it, good performance reviews result in higher occupational safety, access to bigger guns, faster cars, and more call-ins for support.
Sounds rough but there’s some decent job variety here. Cordell can pilot a helicopter and track down perps, can focus on gang violence, or spend the entire shift writing parking tickets. Most of the job is like this — about the paperwork — ensuring that Cordell notes down the correct crime based on the evidence presented. It’s staged like this: Cordell will witness an incident or something suspicious, check the suspect’s license, search them, run a breathalyzer if required, then check the boxes for the crime, before booking them.
We watch on isometrically. Like the original Grand Theft Auto games. Just as much as those games have inspired a series of equally or exceedingly lawless clones, they’ve also sourced an abundance of carbon copies from the other side of the law.
Opting for a split between realism and retro futurism, Averno City is a fairly normative setting for one of these games. The city consists of two islands detailed with diverse districts. In them, exist different kinds of NPCs, cars, and challenges (keeping it simple: you’re looking at jumps over ramps, time trials, and races, mostly). The city is compact and easy to get around, the districts and patrol zones each very small play spaces for the game to express policing in miniature.
For Cordell, joining the force was an act of redemption, after his father, a known cop in the precinct, was killed in the line of duty. Now he wants revenge. So, over the course of his police work, Cordell investigates two warring gangs and works his way up the ladder to confront their leaders.
Police work is not all heroism and glory but in The Precinct, that’s about all it is. It doesn’t feel propagandistic so much as not fully thought through. It doesn’t try to wrestle with what Cordell has to do. It doesn’t really care about that. It has in mind that the citizens are anti-police and seemingly knows what we are doing is often fascist work, but has no further commentary than having someone Cordell arrests being displeased to have met a cop at the wrong time. It’s soulless, at this level, which jars against the possibilities of worlds that can feel more material and lived-in — think Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) & Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (2009) — there’s every possibility for crime stories to be imbued with soul but also say something about what we’re doing while exploring them.
The Precinct opts for the depth of a television procedural. And it is a game about the process of law, especially, and not at all about the actual nature of the police. Situated in the 1980s facsimile of an American city, there is so much room for political and social currency and commentary. Here, The Precinct is a wide miss. When it comes to top-down arrest simulations, however, it’s surprisingly fun and a compact throwback to how these types of games used to look and feel.
5/10
Reviewed on Steam Deck