This is difficult to review. I feel like some aspects are improvements and others are downgrades from the previous game.

So... The good:
It is far less repetitive. In the first game, at later stages, every call felt like a chore because there was nothing new happening during each of them. Now, it feels like you have a lot more control over everything. You even get to choose whether or not you want the criminals dead (sometimes unintentionally).

I also enjoy the new stats for your cops. You get to work off their personalities a little. Lazy or drunkard cops can be put up as detectives by upping their intelligence slot, and thus they won't end up in the hospital through car accidents. That blind guy who hates batons? He is a great shooter with no need for strength.

The operations are fun... at first. If you are giving them your first tries, you will probably enjoy them. I'll elaborate more on this later.

I also have nothing against giving your underlings a bit of a personality, which the game kind of manages to do.

I should also appreciate that they seem to have cut down the side jobs that end up killing or dismissing your cops. Nothing worse than being punished for playing the game.

How you hire new cops and get new equipment has been completely revamped, and I like it. It is more rewarding and faster too, since it can be done after each day of work.

The investigations have also been improved. More divisive and at the same time less misleading, if that makes sense? It isn't so much about finding out exactly how things played about, but finding out who did it (and you can accuse the wrong person, which is awesome).

The hospital is another nice addition. It makes sense, and adds another layer to mistakes besides dead cops.

Since I am not too keen on the marerials and how you are forced to distribute them to your cops, I also appreciate the automatic distribution.

Neutral:
This is just an observation, but I feel like the difficulty has been quite raised. I am neutral on this because some of it feels fair, while other parts feel completely ridiculous.

Jack's personality has made him seem like a less good (I feel like "worse" doesn't work here) person. It is understandable that he is bitter and I still find him enjoyable to watch and follow. I felt it somewhat harder to relate to him though, at least so far. He seems somewhat selfish in addition to everything we already knew.

Bad:
Okay... now we're reaching the nasty parts. First and foremost, your staff. I get it, some people don't like each other, just like real life, but these people's excuses are ridiculous. I feel bigger urges to torture some of my cops than the criminals I bring in. You want an example? A girl doesn't work with anyone with less professionalism than her. A man doesn't work with women. One of the guys can only go on one job before being "tired like a dog" for the rest of the day. And if a cop loses their loyalty? Well, they'll outright refuse your orders, and they will ruin any operations you have the misfortune of including them in. And you can't punish them in any way. Your staff has the power to make you so miserable even Mayor Rogers would feel jealous.

Now, the operations. It's fun at first, right? After a while, the magic is gone. You send your cops, you figure out stealth is the only proper approach if you want all of them to live until the end, and you spend easily an hour trying to kill off or arrest henchmen in quiet ways. Hostage situations are particularly painful. If the hostage dies, you are doomed to either fail or restart. And as soon as the criminals notice the cops, you bet they will gun down their own hostages. It would have been much better if the hostages counted instead as killed civillians and the player was still able to murder every last criminal now that the stakes got lower.

The professionalism requirements are insane. After a while, missions require 1000 or 2000 professionalism, which means you must send either your best cop with a weak one, or a bunch of lesser cops. But what's that? Cop A thinks cop B smells like ♥♥♥♥, so he refuses to cooperate. So you bring cop C instead, but cop C dislikes working with officers that don't dress up good (I'm not joking here). Now you can't send cop D instead, because his professionalism is not high enough, and now you can't even answer the call. It feels absolutely awful to be unable to respond to calls with 4 or 5 able cops in your HQ.

The regular 20000 dollar extortion is a nice way to add up difficulty, but I feel like it blocks off several gameplay aspects that require money. You are so often greedily marching to the 20k that you stop caring about the trainers, the buying of items or the shadier services.

Managing your staff is also quite tedious and annoying. The shift mechanic in the previous game seemed fine in that regard. You should at least be allowed to form a schedule for them to follow.

I must say I also do not like how the material distribution works. It's fine at first, but as some cops go to funerals, show up unannounced or simply appear, you end up with nearly unarmed policemen while others have their pockets full of electricity and pepper spray.

The game is also incredibly complicated. You are overwhelmed with chores. Between gangs, competitions, resource management, human management, remembering not to give a baton to the blind guy, keeping yourself above 20k, making sure Lilly doesn't call the feds because of 3 bad days in a row, managing one workforce and manually splitting the shifts every day, picking meals (and partly paying for them!), investigating 2 suspects at once, keeping your underlings' loyalty in check, torturing criminals and handling all the call procedures that aren't false alarms, you end up feeling exhausted playing this, even if it is fun.

All in all, I'm not sure. I enjoy the game despite all of the bad things I mentioned. I still enjoy the story, and I certainly don't feel like the gameplay is as repetitive as the first one in the end. I would recommend it if you enjoyed the first one, I guess, since this still feels largely like an improvement.

This game is SO CLOSE to the police simulator/management game I wanted, but due to several critical flaws, it falls short. I loved the first game, even if it did get quite repetetive after awhile, but I thought for sure the sequel would fix that issue. And while it (sort of) did, it added multiple new problems in it's place.

First of all, the staff management. Oh my holy god, the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ staff management. Sharpwood has got to have the absolute worst police department in the modern age. You are given a dozen staff to work with to start off, and unlike the first game where you sort them into shifts, you simply pick and choose who you want to work the next day. The problem is, these people are so unreliable, they wouldn't be able to hold a part time job at McDonalds. I ♥♥♥♥ you not, the first week of the game, you have a cop who flat out doesn't show up to work at all because he is practicing for his bands show that weekend/making drumsticks out of a tree trunk/ doing blow with Bill Clinton/ going to Mars/ etc. Basically, just the most laughable excuses to not show up to work. I thought this was just a gag, but it turns out, apparently anyone can just not show up to work when they feel like it in Sharpwood PD. People can just skip out on work to do anything they want, and there is no way to reprimand them or fire them. And if you don't let them take the day off, now they hate you and will find ways to make your life even more miserable.

The staff also become very tired very fast. Just going on a few calls is enough to make them start falling asleep at the wheel and kill themselves, or go into the hospital for several days leaving you with even less staff to work with. And unlike the original, where you could still send out one or two cops on a mission they likely won't be able to handle, just so you can have a chance at completing it, in TItP2, you need to have a high enough "professionalism rating" to actually answer the call. Each cop has their own rating, and the amount of officers has to total a high enough rating to go out. This usually requires 2, maybe 3 officers. On most days, that about half or close to half of your total shift. But then, someone on that call won't go out with someone rated lower than them. Someone else won't go without a partner. Someone else refuses to do your dirty work, etc. The staff will honestly find any reason to not go out on calls.

Now, you can always try to hire new staff to buff up your numbers, right? Well now, you don't buy staff using cash. You use beer tabs. Think of these as tokens you cash in for new cops and equipment. You earn these tokens by catching criminals, completiting cases, etc. And you lose them whenever you ♥♥♥♥ up. At the end of the day, they are tallied up, and you can buy some stuff. Problem is, just messing up a few calls can sink you down to no tabs earned, or earning less than 10 a day. Most new cops cost bare minimum of a dozen tabs, a good cop will run nearly 30. So if you just get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ over one day, where half your stuff doesn't show up, won't go on calls, get loaded on the job, or just get flat out killed overnight, you can lose a an enormous amount of tokens. Oh, and if you have 3 days in a row where you lose more tokens than you earn, Lilly Reed calls the feds on you. You also get the feds called on you if you don't earn 20 grand a week.

Now, my biggest disapointment, is the XCOM style operations, where you can order your cops around individualyl to complete a mission. This mode is basically XCOM done badly. It is terribly slow to move your cops around. I spent 2 hours on a mission, that I eventually just gave up on because I was so sick of doing it (that cost me 15 tabs btw). Your officers often go down and die in 1 bullet. There are also traps on the ground that can immobolize your officer and kil them in several rounds if they don't get evacuated. Got a hostage or a bomb situation? Then you need to either move so fast to defuse the bomb that you will likely have several people die trying to finish the mission in time, or have the mission take 45 minutes just to get spotted by the enemy near the end and the hostage gets executed. Most situations seem to put about a dozen enemies on the map. You will, at most, have 6 officers. If you go loud and get into a firefight, expect at least a couple of these officers to die, because the cover system doesn't seem to be particularly effective. Stealth is an option, but is so time consuming, that just one ♥♥♥♥ up can result in you having wasted nearly an hour of your time on a mission you fail anyway. In short, this mode is not very fun, and is mostly just incredibly frustrating and tedious.

As for the story, I had heard the phrase in a pre-release review "It's like a Quentin Tarantino movie but without any of the interesting dialogue", and that's pretty much dead on. You will know what I mean immediately once you start playing . The game starts with about 30 minutes of pure cutscenes, and scenes usually involve a character going on a huge monologue about some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that has nothing to do with the plot, and you keep thinking they must be going somewhere with it, but they aren't. The two most common phrases that come into my mind when listening to the dialogue are "Get to the point" and "Shut the ♥♥♥♥ up". The premise of the story is also....rocky, at best. I don't want to explain too much at risk of spoiling things, but basically, the story moves at a glacial pace with characters and dialogue that range from obnoxious to boring.

Despite how negative this review is, the game isn't the worst thing ever. The core elements of what made the original great are still here, but all the new systems make the game less fun to play. In it's current state, it is a mind-numbingly frustrating chore to play This Is The Police 2. The bits of fun are scattered between massive black holes of gameplay where you just want it to let you get the ♥♥♥♥ back to having fun.I hope we see changes made post release, otherwise this is gonna be one of my biggest disappointments of 2018.

If you buy the game it will take you two hours to get through a Xcom type turn based tutorial, an hour of various storylines to build up the characters, and an example of solving a crime lining up pictures in the correct sequence based on the clues provided. There is no play mode (easy, normal, hardcore) Starting out is rough and some of the officers wont work with each other, will call off, develop attitudes, and just plain wont work two days in a row. Bottom line you will fail calls due to lack of staff. Not every call you respond to is turn based, but rather assigning an officer to the appropriate response option and a success or fail result.

Pro:
Everything in the trailers is in the game.
The voice acting is pretty good, and music is appropriate for the game.
Lots of perks, equipment, stat assignments to your officers.

CON:

it would be nice to have an easier play mode starting out with more staff and money.

Some of the calls should not require three officers to a public indecency taking most of your team out of service and then hit you with a kidnapping or bank robbery. You cant respond to a call without the minimum number of officers.
Some of the balance issues could send you down a spiral of failure requiring a new start of the game.
No save mode. Game is a day by day in game check point.

Bottom line: You'll either love or hate this game. There is no middle ground.

8/10

It's an enjoyable game that wears out it's welcome. Late into the game, the daily events start to get unfair (with a high number of false alarms) and boring.

While the voice acting is top notch, the initial cutscene where you don't get to actually play the game takes well over an hour - a very strange choice on the game designer's part. They loved their own writing way too much.

When you're actually playing the game, it's pretty great. The crimes are well-written and engaging to deal with, and strategising which cops to send out is really fun.
The cutscenes, however, are honestly painful to sit through. You can skip them but they're a big part of the game and its such a shame that the writing sucks so much. 80% of the writing is just people stammering and talking about boring, average things. It really feels like they were trying to copy Pulp Fiction's style of dialogue, where characters talk about random ♥♥♥♥, but seriously failed to do it in an entertaining way. While the graphic novel style of the cutscenes is pretty cool, when the writing is this dull it becomes really hard to follow when there's nothing visually happening on screen, as its mostly just still images.
Voice acting's good, but without a lot of strong dialogue to deliver it doesn't help much.

TLDR fun game, terrible cutscenes.

TL; DR:
Decent mechanics, challenging but not absurd difficulties, good combat, god-awful dialogue writing.

First of all, the game worked fine for me, 10+ hours of playtime and not one single bug or glitch.

The difficulty was fine for me too, I played the pre-balance patch version, though I gotta admit the game is tough at the beginning and the bullcrap excuses your officer pulled can be overwhelming. It all got balanced out when later in the game you unlocked methods to cope/deal with such scenarios. For me all you really need to do is hold on through November, it should be smooth sailing once you pulled off a couple of stealthy raids.

The reason I loved the first game is mainly about its simplicity in gameplay and depth in character development, this sequel did a complete reverse of that:

The gameplay got some further development, adding new mechanics such as the turn-based combat and the blackmarket, not necessarily a bad thing, though I would argue the combat felt like a downgraded, more clunky version of XCOM or Shadowrun, it amp'd up the difficulty all right, and the recommended option for stealth approach in a turn-based environment is something we don't see every day.

My utter problem is, without a doubt, the cringy, overly dragged, dialogue that got delivered in a piss-poor effort of performance. Characters often just wander in the trance of a monologue hell and stuff the cutscene with one unnecessarily detailed, awfully self-obsessed lecture that has nothing to do with the plot or the original point they're trying to make.

I see other people also complained the cutscenes being too long, for me, a long cutscene isn't the problem here, it's the cutscenes being filled with self-obsessed characters who drag everything with monologues——I tried to forgive it, reasoned with myself that it's just a failed effort to create an annoying character, but when the game is filled with such insufferable dialogues, it's on the writer's inability to create authentic life scenarios.

This game is good, hence why I left a positive review. But, when you compare it to the first This Is The Police game, it's not even half as good. It has many major and minor flaws. Towards the end of the game, it looks like they just wanted to finish the game fast. You can't collect any more tabs towards the end of the game and you can't use them too. You can rarely choose the music. The protagonist is not a guy that you can ever possibly like, while in the first game, he was much more likeable. But now, I just hate him and his behavior. There are no detectives, no SWAT team, and no paddy wagon (they existed in the first game). You may get stuck with officers that you don't want (for example, having an alcoholic mole that doesn't want to get his alcoholism treated). Some days, you may get bombarded with so many missions, that you can't possibly complete all of them, especially because some officers don't want to go there with some of the other officers. I don't mind seeing cutscenes at all, but some of them felt kinda unnecessary. Also, the game will crash after a specific cutscene. My actual playtime is around 30 hours, so it can offer you a lot of hours to play. It's also extremely cheap. In conclusion, it's a good game with many flaws, but just don't try to compare it to the first game.

After reading many reviews I was worried about the sequel to one of my favorite indie games. It reminded me of how the first Godfather game was good (not great but what the game did have really catered to what I wanted) and then I blindly played the sequel and found it was total ♥♥♥♥. But I decided to take a risk and buy it anyways and I’m so glad I did, I’ll start off by saying that if you’re not a fan of strategy games especially the sub-genre of management simulators then this game is not going to do anything to convince you otherwise. But if you are a fan of the genre or at least have no reason to dislike it then please give a try. After reading through many negative reviews I use this review to discuss them. The opinions of not liking the game are definitely valid but I would like to comment on the common reasons why many posted negative reviews

Many negative reviews spoke about the long cut scenes that bored players or didn’t like the direction of cut scenes that made it seem longer than it needs to be. I may only be 12 hours in or about 11 in day games in but I will say that those story cut scenes are long no doubt but they are very entertaining and necessary. They do a great job of introducing certain characters and the town of Sharpwood especially when you compare the first game’s Freeburg as well as establishing the previous game's protagonist Jack Boyd. This is a story heavy game as you are constantly making choices that have future consequences. So you can ignore the story if you want by just holding the mouse button to skip cut scenes but you’ll be bombarded with events from the story so if you don’t pay attention you’ll be forced to make choices about events you'll have no information about.

The next negative comment is about how this game is hard, there are two parts to this referring to the Management section and the turn based strategy X-COM style sections. Regarding the management sections as long as you can accept that not all unavoidable choices lead to positive outcomes and that there are no 100% "perfect" methods this game isn't hard. If you try to try every in game day expecting perfection then yeah the game will seem unrelenting but that's a fault of the player not the game. I will warn you that the game is serious about consequences and several bad choices will make the game much harder than it needs to be. Just like the first game you can easily dig yourself in a hole that you can't get out of not in a "you made a wrong choice that leads immediately to a Game Over" way but there are certain goals that you need to accomplish at deadlines and the game is fair about giving you ample time to do it but is unforgiving if you don't. Now it is my personal opinion but I think anyone referring to these X-COM section of the game as hard either has not played or forgot that actual X-COM levels are way harder than what's presented here. they may not be brain dead easy as you have to order your officers efficiently while minimizing risks but there is no unfair element plus the game even offers a menu option to restart the mission with no penalty so if you do get caught by surprise then just restart, simple right?

The next criticism is that the game has bad writing. I wouldn't say it's bad but it's definitely a different style of writing compared to the first game. It’s not bad in the way where character's dialogue contradict the logic of the in game world or characterization is unjustifiably changing but bad in that characters often talk at length about nothing important or could get the point across using less words. Here's an early in game example. An in game character Lilly is the Sheriff of Sharpwood but despite her high rank she is not confident and not taken seriously or respected. how the game portrays this is by when one officer asks Lily a question only as an excuse for him to ramble on about himself and what he wants and then other officers join in the increasingly irrelevant conversation with Lily's few comments being ignored. Sounds alright but this scene feels like it takes way to long for what little it's trying to say. I would say it's like Seinfeld. I like Seinfeld but I know many people don't.

For the other "it's different from the first game and I don't like it complaints" I will say if you haven't tried the first game it's not necessary that you play it but just know if you want the story you're going miss several nuances that game, so far from what I have played, talks around but won't overtly spoil. That being said if you have played the first game yes the game is different and it may be changes that are hard to adapt to at first but the game does change its mechanics to compensate. For example yes you start with probably half the staff as you did in the first game and they are not organized into two shifts. This is a heavily abridged way of explaining the new mechanic but know that the sequel cares more about the quality of the officer rather than quantity. Each officer has attributes that make them better suited for certain calls than others. In the first game you could just hire a lot of officers and just send officers en masse as the game only cared about the total "professionalism" points needed to succeed. The sequel is different you could send 6 officers to a call but if the call requires certain attributes or tools that none of the officers have then you will fail. However this also means that you can get away with sending only one officer with the right ability or tool and succeed whereas the first game that lone officer would most likely just fail. There are many more ways the sequel changes things up but just know that these new changes are well accounted for so long as you don't try to play too much like the first game.

As of writing this the total average for the game is 58% which I’m worried will turn others away from this very wonderful game and I hope for those that are reading my review you'll have a counter argument when weighing the other negative reviews and play the game or at the very least have a more informed opinion on why you may not like the game.

This game is ridiculous. So, you are telling me that in the Police you can refuse going on patrol or answering calls cause you dont like your partner? You can skip day after day on the job cause your uncle need meds? And to be a loyal cop your boss needs to say yes to whatever you ask him. If not, you are able to take some random free days cause, you know, you're mad at him. Please, teen developers. Thats massive ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Game is one enfuriating nonsense after another. Especially, if you are a Policeman and most of the year you spend between 180 to 350 hours per month on the work. This is a joke. Not the Police.

It was really hard whether to decide to recommend this game or not; there's good and not so good. I bought the game on sale for $5, which feels about right, but I don't think it's worth full price. It's very frustrating because with a few pretty simple tweaks, it could be an awesome game.
The good: The day-to-day gameplay involved was addictive and fun. I really enjoyed developing my cops' skills and sending them out to deal with criminal complaints or on the tactical missions. A lot of the scenarios were creative and humorous, and the world of this isolated town felt rich, interesting and vibrant.
Interspersed with this enjoyable gameplay, you occasionally get the chance to watch scenes from what feels like a crime drama that starts off really, really, REALLy slowly, but picks up nicely at the end. And the really nice thing is you can skip those if you want without really affecting the gameplay.
The bad: The cut scenes could really use an editor. They just drag on and on. I'm sure whoever developed them thought the conversations about black mold or whatever were integral to building mood for the story or something, but that's what all writers say, and they really could use an editor to trim down the fat. Also, nothing you do in the game affects the cut scenes in any way. There is one story to be told, and the game tells it no matter what you do. Remember this before you devote too much time to a silly mini-game near the end.
But really my main complaint is that this game would be amazing if it had some sort of sandbox mode, where you could just respond to emergency calls, fight the eccentric gangs and interact with the wacky denizens of this town. Include that option, and the game would be worth the full price.
Instead, however, the only option is to follow the drawn out movie the game is following, which cuts down on replayability. A game you can't replay and that is more Netflix drama than game is only worth about $5 in my book. If you can get it for that price, go for it, but otherwise I don't think I can recommend it.