‘Police: Shootout’, developed by Games Incubator and Hypnotic Ants, is a turn-based, first-person shooter, a bizarre combination indeed. Here, you must step into the footsteps of a cop and make all the hard decisions, some harder than you may realise.

The story has a decent premise. You play as our protagonist, Officer Scott Price, who has newly transferred to the city of San Adrino, a grimy and dangerous city. This man in the blue uniform is no rookie to crime and has moved to this town full of crime and degeneracy to investigate the case of his missing brother. As the plot thickens and many of the crimes in San Adrino thread towards the same suspects, you must decide your main weapon: your gun or the power of your words.

Will you avenge with force or fight with fairness and justice? I do respect a story that has a crack at a narrative. However, in this case, the dialogue was sometimes very absent of expression or detail, something you need in a game where emotions should be high and full of tension. This makes the story’s impact not as punchy and the somewhat predictable ending even less profound.

The gameplay ranges in genres despite the turn-based drawcard, making for a nice breakup in gameplay. Initially, you log onto your computer in the station to get your cases to investigate. Once you drop into the call-out location, you will arrive in your police car with a radar of information and a first aid kit that you can return to use anytime in the mission.

At the site of the mission, the player will then need to collect evidence to build a case. This can be from talking to witnesses, collecting evidence, or confronting perpetrators. When you encounter aggressive attackers, the gunplay turns to rudimentary turned-base, close-quarters fighting. Players have a limited time duration to pick a series of actions. Depending on the scenario, you get a certain amount of action points, with red as planned actions and blue as how many you have all up or left. Glowing shields on the floor mean you can take cover there and can be moved back and forth at the cost of an action point.

If you are lucky enough, you also get to interrogate suspects to the point they give in and let you arrest them. Once you have heard all the facts and correct information, you get to try to convince the perp with the right evidence profile cards to avoid a shootout. Convince, and you get to handcuff in a full arrest. Be too confrontational, and make sure you have your guns drawn. This is the most intriguing part of the gameplay flow, and I enjoyed analysing each criminal.

After the mission, you level up after a wrap-up report of your actions. Levelling up skills can be in the form of fighting, negotiations and sneaking abilities.

I wasn’t too impressed by the audio work in Police: Shootout. Firstly, the voices are very robotic, dare I say very A. I sounding. For scenarios such as stalking, hold-ups and hostage situations, as mentioned before, the line delivery is very flat and emotionless.

Like a vacuum, it sucks all the feeling out of the scene. The constant piano music in the menus and back at the station is also very off-putting, not creating a welcoming atmosphere. Couple this with the generic sound effects of gunfire and car horns, making for a very underwhelming experience.

The graphics were sound. I was neither impressed nor completely disappointed. The environments were decently designed, and the NPC character models were noticeably different. Nothing popped, though, and animation actions like running were very janky in movement.

One other niggling issue I had was the tutorial. While the rest of the game ran smoothly, the tutorial was a buggy experience. The graphics glitched, the tutorial instructor couldn’t even get out of the doorway, and my character model had to inch him out.

Police: Shootout, despite not being a perfectly round game, has an interesting premise. Using genre-hopping from turn-based shootouts to information analysis and interview interrogations was a nice little formula. Police: Shootout might not be promoted to detective work yet, but it was a decent time as an average beat cop.

Written by: Stacey