The Precinct review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

There’s something almost wholesome about The Precinct. Even though it takes its cues from early GTA – as in, back when it just gave you a top-down view – the game has you playing as a police officer. And not a crooked police officer, either. Rather, the main character is a young officer whose late father was also a cop, who wants to clean up his city one street at a time.

On top of that, The Precinct has a much heavier focus on the day-to-day beats of being a police officer than you might expect. It’s not quite a job simulator game, since there’s definitely a story, but you’ll spend a significant chunk of your time here walking your beat, just doing everyday things. You’ll stop muggings, capture graffiti artists, give parking tickets for cars that are parked in the wrong zone – in other words, you’ll spend a lot of time doing the grunt work that you wouldn’t do in a game like LA Noire.

And for the most part, it works pretty well, though not always in the ways the game probably intended (more on that in a moment). The Precinct gives you every tool you need to succeed, whether it’s an unlimited supply of cop cars, backup arriving for everything you could ask for, or criminals who, for the most part, are awfully easy to catch. You do need to follow procedures – reading a criminal his rights, for example – but it’s very easy to settle into the kind of rhythm that makes these games fun.

What makes The Precinct extra-fun, though, is that it never seems to realize its own goofiness, which means that you can use its sandbox nature to make things get absurd. Take those unlimited cop cars, for example: you can make good use of them, because no matter how many you crash or, say, drive off a pier in pursuit of a bad guy, the force will always send you another whenever you request it.

Similarly, The Precinct’s world is awfully breakable and the citizens of Averno City have incredible reflexes, which means that you can drive like a maniac and suffer no consequences. At first it wasn’t intentional, but then I realized that there were plenty of shortcuts that I could crash through and suffer no damage. Fences, streetlights, hydrants: I sent all of them flying without a moment’s hesitation, and I almost never had to worry about my reckless driving causing harm to anyone.

Admittedly, there was one time I took a blind turn around a corner during a high-speed chase, smashed through a hot dog cart, and dragged three people on my windshield for half a block while I heard their little voices complaining (and my partner let out a meek, “Hey, be a little more careful!”) but that was a rarity. A very, very funny rarity.

The unintentional comedy makes it easy to overlook The Precinct’s flaws. The gameplay can become repetitive, for example, since you really need to grind your way through the grunt work of policing if you want to be able to earn enough experience to unlock SWAT vehicles and more helicopters. The story also isn’t anything special, but rather feels like the developers just tried to cram in every cop movie and TV show cliché they could think of.

But even with those flaws, I still had a blast with The Precinct. True, some of that was because I just wanted to see how much of the game’s world I could smash up – but that’s kind of the point of an open-world sandbox game like this one. It may not feel original, but The Precinct knows how to take that familiar beats and give you room to uphold law and order/cause chaos to your heart’s content.

Kwalee provided us with a Precinct PC code for review purposes.