The Precinct Game Review: Is This Police Simulator Worth Playing in 2025?

Detailed review of The Precinct - the police simulation game that flips GTA's formula. Discover gameplay mechanics, progression systems, strengths, and weaknesses of this cop simulator before you buy.

May 27, 2025

The Precinct Review

Introduction

Well, this will be an interesting review.

Originally this was going to be a review for the demo of the game The Precinct. However, I played the demo all the way through and loved it so much that I immediately picked it up. Since then, I've been playing the game religiously and I have a lot to say about it.

Initial Impressions

What do I think of The Precinct?

Unfortunately, as my time with the game grew, my opinion fell. Not because the game got bad, but because I felt it overstayed its welcome.

The premise of the precinct is: what if old school GTA but instead of playing the criminal you play the police. The Precinct is a fantastic blend of simulation, and action that blends the Papers Please + GTA vibe that a police simulation game should.

Gameplay and Systems

Tutorial

The game starts out on the first day of your job. You find out through dialogue that, unfortunately, your father is dead. Your father was the head of the local precinct, who struck in all the gangs and criminals in the area. With him gone, you have big shoes to fill, but your colleagues are hopeful that you'll be able to get the job done. You go out on your first day of training with your partner, officer Kelly. He shows you how to give traffic tickets, how to apprehend people, and the basics of what to arrest them for versus just issuing a fine. Following this you're taken on a helicopter tutorial where you fly a police helicopter offering surveillance and call outs from the sky. After your first day, you're set free to do any of these that you want. You can either choose recommended missions or create your own.

Long Term Progression

From that day forward, you patrol the city and stop crime. At the end of the day, you turn in any evidence you’ve collected and learn more about the gangs ruling the city. You also level up and get upgrade points that allow you to choose new abilities for your cop. As you level up, you also get access to new cars, new guns, and harder, more difficult beats that involve more violent crimes.

I love this system. The progression system does a great job introducing players to the world of being a cop. Many of the systems the game uses are compelling.

Assigning Offenses

After you have apprehended A perp, you have the choice to manually add offenses based off of what the person has done. For example, the lowest offense someone can do is littering. If you see someone littering, all you have to do is stop them, check their ID, search them, and then issue a fine.

Wait a minute, did I just say stop them, check their ID and search them? Yes, I did, in this universe stop and frisk is OK, as well as cops driving around doing practically whatever they want. In this world, you get to play kind of a dirty cop. With that being said, you don't get to arrest innocent civilians, but your powers to find wanted criminals are what I would call... unconstitutional.

The most interesting system to me is the ability, like I said, to manually add offences based off what you’ve seen. This can be done automatically if you’re not interested, but you get more XP for doing it yourself.

For example:

If they're littering, you can just add littering to the list of offenses.
If they've run away, then you add evading arrest.
If they then fight back, that's assault.

Finally, if they're carrying any weapons, then you add possession of unlicensed weapons to that list.

If the offense is more than issuing a fine, which it more often is, then you arrest the perp and you can either call another cop to take the perp back to the precinct, or you can bring them back yourself for more XP.

Crime Encounters and Backup

Another system I like is the fact that perps have both a health meter and an intimidation meter. As you chase the perp and call them out, they will slowly lose willpower, and if you do that for long enough, they may eventually give up and turn themselves in. This is especially important in situations where you're dealing with violent offenders who are armed. Sure, you can just outright kill them all and that is totally legal and will successfully complete the mission. However, you get more XP for taking them in alive, so you're encouraged to. Continue to yell at them, get their health down low and actually shoot near them but don't hit them in order to bring their willpower down enough that they give U. Of course, this is easier said than done because oftentimes in gang fights, you're fighting against five to seven people. O if you're doing really well, you're lucky to get maybe four of those people alive.

Like I said, picking up evidence such as weapons and other contraband gives you an insight into the criminal underworld. Collecting enough evidence will give you a tip on where the criminals are. Each gang has three people in their hierarchy who you have to hunt down, and if you've collected enough evidence on each person, you start a raid in which you hunt that person down and eventually arrest them.

One of my favorite systems in the game is the ability to call and. Backup. As you're chasing down a perp, you gain kind of a backup meter, which once filled, you're able to call in different levels of backup, including other officers, other cars, and more advanced things as you go along. This pairs well, as oftentimes you'll be chasing perps through high speed chases. Long on foot chases and sometimes through violent gang encounters like I said before.

Side Stories and Content

Additionally, there's also a murder mystery happening at the same time where you're trying to find somebody who has been brutally murdering people around the town and leaving clues.

There's also a wealth of side content to do in the game. There are plaques and messages that lead to mysteries of finding secret items that were lost from the museum. There are optional races, jumps, and hidden vehicles to find that you can commandeer.

So, does that sound fun to you? If the answer is yes, then great, you'll probably like the game.

The Precinct’s Weaknesses

Now let me give you some reasons you might not like the game.

Crime Frequency

First off, crimes happen way too much.

Say you're on a beat where all you're supposed to do is hand out traffic tickets. Nearby, somebody litters and all of a sudden, your focus changes to catching that person who littered. Then, as you're chasing that person who littered, you'll spot a robbery. So now your focus is on deciding whether or not you want to follow the person who littered or chasing the robbery. Then, while chasing the perp who stole the goods from the store, you'll spot a mugging. And so, you have to decide whether or not you'd like to stop the mugging or the person who just robbed the store. Then while you're chasing the person who's mugging, you'll spot someone littering and you'll get a full alert and to have to decide whether or not you want to chase the person who's littering or continue chasing the mugger. This happens so constantly it kind of breaks the immersion of the game. If I'm on a beat where I'm supposed to be handing out parking tickets, I think it's a little unreasonable to also have me doing all these other events that I am basically not signed up for.

Even more frustrating is that sometimes it will automatically accept one of the new events that happens. So, I could be in the middle of chasing a violent offender when all of a sudden someone litters and now I just have to stop and issue them a fine. I think there needs to be some sort of priority listing here so that if I'm doing something where there's a violent offender, I don't get bothered by all the lesser crimes that are happening around me.

Speaking of lesser crimes, it feels like the game was not designed for the player to do those for very long. One of the first things you do in your tutorial for the beat cop is to check traffic meters to make sure that people have paid their parking meter. However, what you'll find throughout the game is as you do this in different spots of the world, there is no spot similar to the place you did it in the tutorial. In the tutorial, there's a parking spot with four meters that you walk by. There was practically no other spot in the game with meters. You will just constantly be handing out parking tickets for cars the wrong way and cars that are parked on the sidewalk. That is assuming you don't get distracted by something else anyway. So yeah, that's kind of a bummer.

Ally AI

Next, let's talk about the ally cop AI. The cops that you work out with are very dumb. One of the most common examples of this is when you have a street fight going on. Obviously, there's two people for you to catch. This is very difficult. You have a partner whose name is Kelly, but Kelly only really helps out 25% of the time when he feels like it. So, you'll get out of the car, chase one of the perps, and Kelly will just kind of follow behind you, letting the other guy get away. Or alternatively. Say you catch 1 criminal really easily. You put them in cuffs and then you turn your attention to catching the other criminal. The other criminal will run kind of far away from the first guy, and since Kelly sometimes decides to just follow you instead of saying with the criminal that you've apprehended you. End up losing the guy who you handcuffed because you're so far away from him.

I find this extremely infuriating. A lot of my early game encounters had one or both people get away. The solution to this is calling in another cop to keep an eye on one or both of the perps, but again, the chances of this working are a little bit better than Kelly, but still not 100%.

World Lacking Agency

As I said before, as you level up through the story, you drop gang higher ups and seemingly make a change to the world. Except not really. As I've played, I have gotten most of the way through both of the bosses, and despite doing well, I don't really notice much of a change in the world in some sort of tangible way.

Let's talk a little bit more about Kelly, your AI companion. Along with Kelly being kind of incompetent, Kelly is also extremely annoying and doesn't shut up. Initially his dialogue is fun, but I think he talks too much, and he doesn't have. Enough lines to really make it worthwhile over a long playtime.

Lack of Variety

With all that. Being said, I think the biggest thing for this game is just that it seems to get too repetitive after playing it for a while, and I think that unfortunately that happens just before you finish the game, so it does kind of run out of steam.

Final Thoughts

My final thoughts on the game are this. There is a really solid foundation for this game and if the developers put in a little work to fix these problems and add a few more events and make the. Lesser extreme events, more interesting. There's a very compelling experience here, and frankly I love it the way it is. But the way it is currently can be frustrating and needs some work. I think if you're interested in this, it's totally worth it to give it a shot. But. Again, like, it's also gonna be worth it to wait for a while for the developers to seem like they're fixing it, because it seems like they're actively updating the game as we go.

This will seem contradictory, but as it stands right now, the game is actually one of the best police sims out there. I have a hard time telling you not to play it because I truly think that this game will be great and is currently really really good. But with that being said. You're there's some jank that you’re going to have to be OK with.

Conclusion

Thank you so much for reading, if you liked the review, don't forget to help me out and subscribe for free and check out the game on Steam. If you're looking to get into another game early, I also recommend checking out my review on Wild Gate.