My latest Steam Next Fest obsession is the demo for The Precinct, an old-school top-down open-world sandbox game that plays a lot like Grand Theft Auto except you play as a cop instead of a lawless citizen.
Now, I know what you might be thinking. Isn't being a criminal a whole lot more fun than being a narc? And to that I'd say, in real life, maybe, but in Fallen Tree Games' riff on the early GTA formula I've been having a blast. You've got the same interactivity and freedom of choice within a large urban simulation, except you're in charge here. Since you're a cop with apparently unquestionable authority, you can bomb along in your police cruiser, casualties, walls, and small buildings be damned, and there's no one there to stop you!
I managed to behave for exactly one shootout at a bank with some armed robbers and one police chase before I abandoned my mission with a detained citizen in the back of my cruiser and took to the streets with reckless abandon. I wanted to see how far this game would let me flaunt the rule of law as a cop, and as it turns out, it let me flaunt it pretty darn hard.
'80s-era synth pop pumping auditory courage from my car speakers to my ears, I carved through traffic and red lights in winding streets, plowed through fences, and reduced stone traffic barriers to rubble with extremely satisfying destruction physics. I was looking for something to really test the limits of The Precinct's in-game law and order system. I found it: a large body of water and the perfect slope to use as a ramp, as if the game was tempting me to break its own rules. I answered the call, putting pedal to floor and catching air in pure sandbox nirvana before crashing into the water and escaping the sinking car along with my prisoner.
A nearby ladder out of the water beckoned me, and I climbed out of the river, turned around, and wasted the poor fool with my pistol. Finally, a fail state. The game had had enough. "Don't shoot civilians!" it warned me before reloading my most recent checkpoint. Fair enough, I thought.
As much fun as that was, I admittedly had even more fun after my curiosity was sated and I went back to playing the game how it's actually meant to be played. Chasing down bad guys while shooting at them from my car, calling for backup and laying down spike traps, and engaging in intense shootouts on the ground is thrilling, and it's so dang satisfying cuffing fugitives when you've finally cornered them.
Oh, there's also a story happening. You're the son of a highly respected cop who was murdered, and naturally you're pretty keen on figuring out who did it and bringing down the hammer of justice. There's probably more to the story that I missed in the roughly 30-minute demo, but frankly I was a little distracted by all the gunfire and explosions. I'm sure it's great though!
The Precinct isn't going to win the Golden Joystick Award for best visuals, but it's a pretty looking game. Averno is an '80s-inspired fictional East Coast city marked by neon-lit alleyways, patchy roads glistening with rainwater, and big, decaying parklands, and populated with all sorts of vagabonds, street vendors, and raging taxi drivers. It's got a real neon-noir feel to it that's reminiscent of the classics of the film film genre; The Maltese Falcon, Kiss Me Deadly, and for a relatively modern reference, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.