You wont be far into your Police Shootout career in the fictitious town of San Adrino before you notice the basic animation of NPCs and scant regard to lip-syncing. The graphics are functional at best, and although it's only a 3 year-old PC game by a Polish developer, looks more 2005 than 2025 and doesnt feel like it's been tested thoroughly. The voice acting? Well... They're often unintentionally funny and it's fair to say that recent SNL skits definitely provide less laughs.
Further disappointment comes during the training section, whereby when you "stun" someone with your police baton you don't even swing it–they simply drop to the ground when you press 'A'! The combat is a tactical, turn-based type with action points that limit your movement but with real-time aiming. This could have been an interesting mix of gameplay elements, but getting your shot on target by aiming with the left stick then actually hitting that spot by timing a press of 'A' with a moving dot that sweeps from left to right and back feels weird, and not unlike and ancient golf game.
Once you've completed training (which is advisable) you can choose a mission from the computer map at your desk. There's no actual driving, you simply arrive at the location of the incident in your police cruiser. The game area seems to only compose of a measly few different locations, which you revisit repeatedly. The static police car contains a computer and a first aid kit, which allows a partial heal of any injuries sustained during a mission.
The game has a rather odd card game mechanic that furthers negotiations with suspects. As you speak to people and ask multiple-choice questions you gather clues & evidence which will be recorded in your notebook. Each "evidence" card has info on it and choosing the relevant ones in the correct order means you either succeed or fail in the negotiation, which could mean you "talk a suspect down" and avoid a shootout. Radio messages can also reveal useful info about a particular case. Conversations are often aimless and feel like time wasting or padding, and once you've started one they can't be cancelled and have to be clicked through to a conclusion. This happens frequently as sometimes you have to talk to witnesses multiple times and sometimes you'll have talked them before and they have nothing new to say-but you won't know that until you talk to them. This means what are often inane conversations, some of which can be blamed on things being "lost in translation," can only be skipped through‐which is a pain in the arse.
The backstory has you (Scott) trying to track down your missing brother Jack, while solving the various cases (which can take up to 30 minutes to complete.) These cases (missions) somehow.manage to be varied but samey at the same time. Many don't all make a lot of sense, and some of the plot lines are so daft, they could have been written by AI. This impression isn't helped by dialogue that sounds like much was lost in translation, unconvincing, phoned-in voice acting with oddly varied accents. Your character seems to lose his voice after a while and just has text speech instead‐it feels rather unfinished.There are also an awful lot of reused assets (buildings, furniture etc) and character models (my training officer turned up as a witness or perp a couple of times in later missions!) Police Shootout definitely has a sense of humour, but some of the conversations/interrogations are unintentionally amusing.
Once a case is completed you can upgrade your abilities in a RPG-lite way, and they barely seem to make a difference. Having multiple charges for your stun gun definitely helps with mission score though, as dead peeps lose you points, no matter what they did.
We found a few glitches, but none worse than an NPC we dubbed "Johny Crash" (below), who actually locked the game up solid when we tried to talk to him, meaning we had to start the entire mission over, bearing in mind he was the guy we'd rescued so it was practically the end of the mission and only logical to speak to him. We also managed to fall clean through the ground at one point, but it taught us to not explore too much and restarting the mission fixed this. Another issue that points to a lack of testing and optimisation for consoles is that it seems impossible to select the shotgun with the clunky weapon wheel, which disables one of the achievements–Oh dear!
Police Shootout isn't exactly a terrible game and we've definitely played worse, but it isn't very good either. It moves smoothly and the various cases encourage you to play on, but the repetitive gameplay, bland graphics, weak acting and sluggish controls make it hard to recommend, even at a price of £16.74.
Thanks to Ultimate Games S.A. and Games Incubator for the review code.