Jack Boyd, beloved police chief of Freeburg, has 180 days before he’s forced to retire. But Jack won’t be going out quietly. Over the next six months, he’ll be going all out to fulfill a dream: earn half a million dollars, any way he can. That might be play money for a corrupt cop, but up until now, Jack has been playing by the book. Even with overtime, in six months he wouldn’t make fifty grand. But a police chief has access to all sorts of… informal income. Bribes, weapons and drug sales, deals with the Mafia, skimming off the budget, kickbacks – you name it. And Jack is tired of playing nice. He’s is ready for anything, but only you can decide how far he’ll go.

The next 180 days won’t be just a mad dash for money. Jack will need to keep up his police work too. He’ll send his cops out to handle situations, he’ll coordinate action on scene, monitor the progress of key investigations, oversee the budget, hire and fire – every day, it’s dozens of key decisions that affect countless lives. Even just regular cop business poses lots of problems: a drunken patrolman might gun down a bystander while he’s aiming for an unarmed bully. And it’s not just the staff, it’s the increasingly crazy orders from the mayor's office – not to mention the press and their uncomfortable questions. It’s all a part of life as a police chief.

After its successful Kickstarter campaign last year, This Is the Police is in its final steps of development, with the feedback of hundreds of backers who took part in the Alpha testing as well as from appearances at consumer shows like EGX Rezzed.

This Is the Police will be out this summer as a digital download for PC, Mac and Linux with Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions to follow soon after.

This Is the Police will be playable at PAX East, April 22-April 24.

Jack doesn’t always play it safe, and his actions affect all those around him. The corrupt mayor has been at his throat – and it’s him who sent the retirement memo as soon as Jack turned 60. Freeburg is a great town, but it has its crime problems. There’s major civil unrest brewing, people in conflict, struggling for power. There’s criminal gangs and cartels fighting for territory, businessmen, trade unions, and the church fighting for influence. And the authorities fight for the right to rob the rest of them with impunity.

You can love the police, you can hate the police, but you can’t argue that the police wield enormous power. Each major step Jack takes will shift the established order of things. On your words hang many of the city’s most powerful forces. You can’t win without compromise; you’ll have to find friends somewhere. But who you’re fighting can change every day. If you finish the game broke and out of work, don’t feel too bad – you might have ended the game in prison, or with a bullet in your guts.

Is This Is the Police similar to other games? Partly. To some extent it is a strategy game: you have an array of forces with various attributes, who you send on a variety of missions across the city map. But at the same time it’s an adventure game, and an interactive novel: you get to investigate the relationships between the characters, handle press conferences, and encounter various crimes across a wide range of scenarios. This is also partly a tycoon game, since a lot of the game is tied to money. You’ll want to keep an eye out for new avenues of income, and keep your books – the official and unofficial. 

There’s a variety of game mechanics, and which parts play the dominant role will depend on many factors: your style of play, the decisions you make, and sometimes on the particulars of the case you’re faced with. One day you'll be working the big cases, putting the real crooks behind bars. The next you might be outwitting a suspect, or breaking down a crime scene. There’s plenty of gameplay variation, but our chief task is to ensure that everything that happens on the screen is an important part of the overall story. You won’t get bogged down with the numbers and the attributes of your units, and it’s not just a set of puzzles to solve. As you move from one event to the next, the city of Freeburg will change around you, in response to your actions. The story is not constrained by a particular genre or narrative format, so you can truly take part in the life of a desperate man trying to regain his self-esteem – and you’ll never know how the story will evolve, just around the next turn.