The Precinct is out today and reviews are mixed

Police sandbox simulator game The Precinct is out today, and reviews are mixed. This top-down shooter comes from developer Fallen Tree Games, and it currently sits at 65 on Metacritic and 69 on OpenCritic. So, what happened to this promising game? You can read our full review, but it sounds like the battle between finding the fun and accurately simulating what it’s like to be a beat cop in a 1980s-inspired city was harder to balance than expected.

The Precinct receives mixed reviews: the challenges of balancing fun with simulation

Based on what many reviews are saying, it seems like The Precinct has an entertaining premise that manages to hold up for the first few hours, but eventually wears thin. One place where reviews seem much more positive is on the game’s Steam page. At the time of writing, The Precinct has a 90% positive score from over 120 player reviews. This could be a difference between players and critics, but many of those reviews have only logged two or three hours. It’s probably best to let players get a little further into the game to get a better picture and see how their perspective shifts.

Some reviews discuss the game’s simulation mechanics. Critics have called out how unexpectedly satisfying it can be to simply write out parking tickets. This also comes into play when stopping people on the street to check IDs, book criminals, and wait for crimes to be reported before jumping into the action. All of these things can be boring, and in some ways, it is, but at least on some level, the game is committed to the simulation of being a good, honest cop.

But the illusion quickly fades when there are no consequences for crashing the car into city property or jumping in front of innocent drivers to give out hit-and-run tickets. It’s also worth mentioning how unrealistic it is that your partner can teleport into the car with you as you drive away, even though the game specifically tells you to wait for them. This imbalance in what is treated like reality and what isn’t does not do the game any favors.

If The Precinct was trying to emulate classic cop movies, as many reviews seem to suggest, maybe they should have included a police chief who gets furious with the player anytime they pull off reckless stunts. The consequences should feel real, to the point that the police chief eventually has to take away the protagonist’s badge, forcing them to go full vigilante in the name of justice. This reaches the point of cliché for a cop movie, but I’ve rarely seen it done in a video game. Especially for a sandbox-style game, it would be great to see how players handle trying to be a good cop and then abandoning the law when the system lets them down.

The ”angry police chief” character is great, but a more realistic approach could have been to have a system that tracks points against the player for being reckless, breaking the law, or causing damage. This would have made every criminal pursuit a balancing act. Is it worth speeding down this road to catch this criminal, even with the potential to total this cop car and cost the city hundreds of dollars? This can be a great way to simulate morality, at least on some level.

We’ll have to see how players react to playing more of The Precinct. Sites like Steam allow reviews within the first few hours, but sites like Metacritic ask users to wait and play more of the game before sharing their review. So, over the next few days, as more reviews start coming in, we can see if this is just a difference of opinion between players and critics or if the reviews are mixed across the board.

The Precinct

May 13, 2025

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• indie games
• simulator games
• Fallen Tree Games