I had a lot of fun with this game! I do not recommend it.

This is the Police 1 was a fun simulator/ management type game starring Jack Boyd, a not so clean police chief trying to do his best to run his department and gain $500,000 before his forced retirement. This included managing the politics surrounding his position (keeping crime families happy, keeping the mayors office happy, doing favours for the public to get bribes, keeping the uniforms happy, etc. etc.). This was on top of managing arrests from time-to-time.

This is the Police 2 took that formula and iterated it, for better and (mostly) for worse. The 2 new features I liked were the respect feature among officers, and the tactical turn-based missions. The respect feature added a lot of personality and head-canons to individual officers and was kinda fun to deal with. The tactical-missions were also a nice change of pace and added an extra layer of strategy into the game that was entertaining to deal with. The forgiving nature of these missions also encouraged some creativity to approaches. Not all of these missions were great, and I wish there was more of these in the game then were present.

Where this game falls weak is everywhere else. It simultaneously created more micromanagement while giving you less to do. While the first game had you occasionally take charge of the actions of your uniformed officers, this game demands the player to make every decision an officer takes in every mission they're sent to do. This is annoying more often than not and takes away from the autonomy of the officers who have sufficient enough stats to be able to do things on their own. And the balancing act of different factions in the first game was completely stripped, meaning the macro-consequences of your actions are less present. The only thing you really have to do is not fail calls 3 days in a row, make 20k a week, and keep your officers happy every once in a while.

The game felt shorter then the first one. I suspect more was planned but was abandoned during development, and I think this can be felt in the narrative and gameplay experience. The story was a bit weak. I won't go into detail to avoid spoilers, but while it had its moments, it fell short of anything satisfying. And some of the cutscenes just dragged on and on. This burden is present because the story continues to follow Jack Boyd, and it has to give a lot of exposition as to why Jack Boyd, wanted fugitive who led a municipal military uprising and is wanted by law enforcment, can act as a defacto police chief in another town without consequence. I think the game would've been a lot better if Jack was some kind antagonist, even a minor one that you take out early on, hiding out in the town, with the focus being on a new character. Maybe have the new character slowly and begrudgingly become similar to Jack was just to achieve their own goals. The games insistence to continue Jack's story just created a half-baked narrative that doesn't change much from the ending(s) of the first game.

There are less gangs and investigations in general, most likely because of the micromanagey style of the game. Detectives don't exist in your precinct either, so you have to use your uniformed officers to investigate. The investigations themselves are actually well made and allow you to specify what your officers are looking for, they're just resource intensive since your officer pool is more restrictive. I wish there was more of these in the game - but there isn't, because the game is shorter days-wise and you don't have to officers to spare in order to consistently do this.

The recruitment and equipment buying system is also a bit jank. Your ability to buy equipment and recruit officers is limited by your performance; but, you can't improve your performance without adequate officers and equipment. Also unlike the first game, you're given a separate currency to purchase officers and equipment, rather than the ability to request expansion and hire them on for free depending on the slots you have available. It's just weird and I'm not personally a fan. You also lose access to recruiting officers in general late game, which just feels mechanically punishing and there's no payoff to this.

Played on the steamdeck. Issues with loading cutscenes and being buggy in general (having to restart of exit the game). I've seen reviews that cite performance issues on different platforms, which suggests optimization problems with the game in general.

This is the Police 2 is fundamentally an unfinished game and unworthy sequel to the first game. What sucks most of all is that the potential to be great was there, just unmet. I hope the talent behind this project do better in future games of similar style. 2/5

Could not be compared to This is the police. The plot becomes horrible at some point and there is a tactical mission that made me basically just fully follow someone playing a playthrough to complete, because its too hard and too specific.
I thought I would love this game, and there are things that I love about it, but boy the negatives are huge.

Spoilers: the game literally just kills off some characters for no reason. I dont know, I expected better.

terrible. if you liked the first game then stick with that, you won't find more of the same in the second game. even if it IS there, it's not worth the pain to get there.

very disappointing

notable issues:
1: the sound volumes didn't change, so even if the levels were set to 10%, prepare to get your ears blown off in the intro. i had to manually change it in windows
2: the voice acting is just bad. it's flat, it sounds like they got highschoolers speaking into a mic in an empty room.
3: the cutscenes drag on and on offering nothing. the point gets made, then it spends another minute or two drilling the point home. it treats the player like a moron.
4: the very first scene introduces XCOM like player-turn events, which was an unwelcome surprise to me at least. if i wanted a game like that i'd buy one, i just wanted more of the same from the first game
5: the writing is terrible. the exact moment i uninstalled and requested a refund was when a cop held a gun to your head, a phone rang and the cop kicked the phone and then shot it (??????) it makes no sense.
6: like i mentioned prior, the cutscenes are too long and offer nothing but you can't skip them, or you'll miss out on story plotpoints so you're forced to just put up with it.

i was so happy to randomly find this game existed, i didn't even know it had a sequel. bought it last night and figured i'd wait until tomorrow because i was expecting a good story-driven game to pull me in and take a few hours. i didn't even last 30 minutes.
no thanks, even for 3.50 i'm refunding this garbage.

None of the charm or depth of the First. All the effort went into making strategic battles and even those are lackluster.

This game makes me really sad because the gameplay is really fun and even more interactive than the first game... however, that's only when the game isn't bombarding with tasks in the minute to minute gameplay. And the game seems much more punishing than the first game. Cops are extremely lazy, show up to work drunk, or don't even show up to work at all. Leaving you understaffed for the day, or worse yet their dumba**es crash while driving and literally perish then and there from the car crash. You could say "that's a future by design" that's true. And that's not the issue, the issue is THEY DO IT ALL THE TIME. EVERY SINGLE DAY.

The story is so god awful, feels like they tried to make it suspenseful and cinematic. But as a result I couldn't give less of a f*ck about anyone or anything, and honestly made me hate the characters i used to like.

Another confusing gameplay mess is the introduction of bunch of minigames unique to this game and not the first, such as the XCOM fights in the middle of a cop manager?? wtf??
Which to be honest, I got used to and it's actually fun. BUT, my main problem is that it's such a change in pacing and mood for the game. One minute you're quickly dispatching officers and counting the seconds till you have enough officers for the next 911 call, then it turns to a slow snail-pace XCOM game.

I want to love this game so damn much, but it is trying its absolute hardest to be an unlikable mess with so many new confused systems that it f*cked up the basic core system of the game.

Once again they managed to make an interesting game and ruin it with a stuffy mechanic where you can't save normally. Replaying the whole day over again because of some random event is definitely a lot of fun (no)

Cutscene watching simulator

I played This is the Police a few years ago and was excited to see there was a sequel.
The cutscenes are awful: they take forever, the characters speak extremely slowly, and the dialogue could be written by a tween on ffnet: "I, uh... you know... well I was... maybe uh... a cop too once... you understand? I mean - well - it's uh... more complicated uh... than you think... do you uh, well... do you understand?" Can you fast forward the dialogue? Sure. It skips the entire 3-5 minute scene and dumps you into an interactive moment that I assume has something to do with the very last piece of dialogue from any given cutscene, because any time I did it the next moment seemed wildly unrelated. There's no way to simply skip line by line. There's no back button, if you stopped paying attention during a 30-second silent montage of somebody standing at a desk and missed the dialogue that came after.
Y'all, i'm tired. I bought this on sale and I'm still annoyed I spent money on it.

This isn't a cop management sim, its a noir visual novel with some gameplay elements. Buyer beware that the cutscenes will get you almost to two hours before the game even really lets you play. I skipped most of the cutscenes after an hour because I still didn't really get to play. My opinion on the gameplay is nonexistant because I came two close to the refund window to actually learn how to play due to all the cutscenes.

Status: Completed

Aside from the management system and a new game mode that mixes SRPG with strategy, everything in this game is worse than its predecessor. The narrative is absurdly disjointed, the characters are bad, and the dialogues are poorly written.