What is good, what is bad, and what works okay.

[That Fellow, Christian]

AS a veteran of XCOM and management games, I wanted to put forward my own thoughts about why this game is nowhere near as good as it could be, and how the next one could be better.

First, and foremost, I had the most fun with this game after removing the resource constraints by editing the save file. This alone shows that the management side of things is tedious and unexplained.

Let's start with officers.

The whole officer management sucks. It's boring, frustrating, and poorly explained. There's no budget, per se, you hire officers and buy their equipment using "tabs" which you earn for successfully solving callouts.

The callouts work, to an extent, but they are just too inexplicable, often having outcomes that seem unbelievable. It's basically a guessing game and too many outcomes leave either your officer dead or injured, or civilians dead and the suspect escaped. The link between which action requires which skill is often tenuous and invisible. Speak to one suspect with your 3-bar negotiator and they'll shoot them dead. Speak to another and it's the only way to resolve the situation successfully. Your hulking 3-bar strongmen will get beat up by a little old lady with a cane. Taze one guy and he'll shrug it off. Taze another, and it's the only way to take him Use a stun grenade in one situation, you save lives, use it in another, and they'll inexplicably fire their crossbow and one-hit kill a bystander.

This would be humorous, however failing to successfully complete callouts costs you tabs.

Another issue with the callouts is how much the required professionalism is calculated. Since I've only played through through the early part of the campaign twice, I can't tell if the cost is based on the total available professionalism in the shift, in your employed officers, or scales obscenely with time. Or some combination of the three, however by 13th December, I'm routinely seeing callouts that require 2400-2800 professionalism, and require 4 or 5 officers to fill. I only have two officers with > 1000 professionalism.

The final problem with the callout system ties into the last one. False reports. Nothing sucks more than sending 2800 worth of officers to a false report. Think you know which reports are false and which ones are not? Think again.

In one callout to a "mined church", my perfect officer and every civilian died because they didn't see a tripwire (despite having int 3 and stealth 3) when entering the church.

Didn't bring a baton? One option for subduing the suspect will be unavailable to you, even if you have a stunner or taser. No way to know in advance if you need a baton or a taser or a stun grenade. Better hope the officers you're forced to send to meet the "professionalism" requirement have the right equipment!

Sending a drunk officer out is a risk, because apparently everyone drives their own car, even though only one car leaves base. Or do they just always put the drunk officer at the wheel? Why can't I assign a sober driver?

In short, what could be a fun gameplay loop around careful allocation of resources turns into guess work and finger-crossing and a lack of effective choice.

The investigations.

Well the investigations are interesting, but boy howdy do they need better explanation. I spent so many shifts trying to find new evidence with my intelligence 3 officer, because the game never tells you that you need to set the focus of the officer's efforts. That could be better tutorialised.

Base management.

There isn't any. Your officers will continue to complain about the terrible state of the building, lack of facilities, etc, but no matter how good you are at managing your resources, there's nothing you can do about it. These are just cutscenes anyway, just serving to emphasise how underfunded and neglected the entire PD is.

This whole section of the game is missing. Base management is a core component of management/tactics games. Being able to manage your fleet of cars (having different cars with different capacities, from patrol to special tactics), and assign officers into shifts and teams would have made a huge difference. Officers that are in teams should develop together, giving unique bonuses or tactical abilities. Upgrade your dispatch facilities to increase response time on calls and allow redirecting units already on approach to a different more important callout. Maintain and upgrade vehicles to decrease travel time. Give officers a driving skill and integrate it into "chase" callouts, as well as accident risk and travel time. Allow officers with a vehicle that has greater transport capacity to divert to a different callout on the way back from another, if there's room left for additional suspects. Add a coffee machine to help deal with fatigue. A pool room to help with stress. Firing range to work on marksmanship, offices for detectives/working on cases, etc etc. There's so much that could have been done here to make this an entertaining management game.

Tactical

This is pretty fun, although lots of QoL features are missing like vision cones, stances, simultaneous movement. This is the best part of the game, and yet, still not as good as it could have been with a little more effort. Tactical missions happen at preset times, and there are a limited number in the game. It would have been better to have some of the callouts spawn a tactical mission (such as bank robberies).

Isometric, with a fixed viewpoint is legacy. It doesn't take that much longer to make 3D assets that can be viewed from any direction.

Selecting traits doesn't make much sense. It means on one mission, an officer can climb a fence, but on another, they just can't manage it. It feels clunky. It also means once you unlock the best abilities (like ninja) you'll never use anything else.

No ability to relocate arrested suspects to prevent them being spotted (sure, I can move my officers, when they are down, but I can't move suspects?).

I like the aiming system, but there's really no reason to ever aim anywhere but the body unless you have a guaranteed headshot.

No medical options. You can't save a wounded suspect or officer. As soon as someone takes a wound, the mission becomes time-constrained at the risk of losing officers or suspects. The bleed-out timer is generous, but no-one has body armour (no bullet proof vests, ballistic shields, etc). No options for different weapon types (pistols, smgs, shotguns). No option to equip silencers. Again, the bones of this part of the game are good, but ultimately it feels like a poor-man's implementation.

Cut scenes.

I like the comic book style, but oh my gosh it is so slow. You can skip the entire cut scene, but there's no way to advance through it.

[Ticonite]

They did fix a lot of your qualms with tactical missions in Rebel Cops. Never did give us the ability to rotate the camera though...