Police Simulator: Patrol Officers: Nintendo Switch Edition (Nintendo Switch) – Le test

Chases on foot or by car, square kilometers of city to crisscross, muscular arrests, action, adrenaline, all within reach of the Joy-Con. Protecting and serving, that’s a dream, isn’t it? Experience all this and more (or less) in Police Simulator: Patrol Officers.

All Cops Are Beautiful

In this game, it all starts with choosing the police officer you will play as. Man or woman, then skin color: white, black, Asian or Latino and off you go. Here we are sitting in front of a desk in a police station choosing our first patrol. As a rookie, it will be a foot patrol. It seems that people park very poorly on the streets of this pretty town of Brighton on the east coast of the United States. Let’s go for a short walking trip which will last from 15 to 90 minutes, depending on our desire, but in any case, it’s long.

A foot patrol means walking around and looking at each parking meter for each car and seeing if the parking time is up yet. But it’s not just that, it’s also checking that no one parks in areas reserved for buses or taxis, it’s also being careful that vehicles don’t encroach on the sidewalk or on the contrary that they are not parked in the middle of the road. It’s also checking the license plate. To be honest, these first patrols are quite difficult, but that’s what it takes to be a good cop.

Each of our successful actions earns us points, and these points are converted into stars over time. Each star earned allows you to unlock different things such as a new area in the city or new work tools like a radar gun for example. Once this radar gun is unlocked, you will have to hunt down the crazy drivers.

The city of Brighton is divided into three large districts which are themselves divided into several districts so the time required to unlock everything is significant. Be careful of the fact that when you patrol a neighborhood you cannot leave it to pursue a thief under penalty of dismissal. It happens quite often that the game freezes and takes us back to the start of our day because we crossed a forbidden limit without paying attention. It’s quite frustrating to have to start a day again when you have won a lot of points.

GTA two fingers to believe it

In any case, after a few patrols, a little over an hour of play, you unlock the vehicles and you can travel the streets of the city behind the wheel of a real American police car with flashing lights and sirens. But that doesn’t make the city more active. We pass a few cars from time to time, we see pedestrians walking like zombies and waiting at the pedestrian crossing. It happens that a jogger crosses outside the confines and has to be fined or that an individual throws rubbish on the sidewalk, but on the whole life in Brighton is quite bleak.

Police Simulator: Patrol Officers is, as its name suggests, a simulation game so it is quite slow overall and the game mechanics are numerous. The developers have implemented a wheel system with multiple choices offering actions to perform, such as taking the gun, the stun gun, the radar gun, the camera, the torch. The system is quite simple to use and you get used to it quickly. The choice wheel works for everything. When you arrive at the scene of an accident, there is a report to be drawn up so you have to take photos, question witnesses, check the drivers’ blood alcohol level, all these actions earn points. After a while, we know how to do these actions and in what order, and we enjoy following the procedure and seeing our points increase.

Knowing that the game was released two years after the other consoles, we might have expected a little polish, but this is not the case. The display in the distance is ugly, the game has bugs, especially when you leave or enter a police station. Pedestrian movements are jerky, there is no music in the game, only the sounds of the city with the sound of traffic and the sound of sirens in the distance from time to time. All this doesn’t spoil the player’s experience too much, but a little more attention wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Police Simulator: Patrol Officers: Nintendo Switch Edition is available on the eShop for around thirty euros.