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.

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.

Originally scheduled for release today (July 28, 2016) This is the Police will be available as digital download on August 2 for PC, Mac and Linux for $14.99.

Hi All,

The reason for the delayed release was a mistake by us here at EuroVideo. When releasing a game on Steam, you have to hit a button in Steamworks saying "ready for final approval from Steam". Steam then proceeds to check the game, and makes sure it complies with their quality standards. Usually this approval process takes 2-5 business days, and you can not release the game without passing it.

We were responsible to hit that button and unfortunately we missed this window, as we realized it yesterday, i.e. too late for a July 28 release. We made a mistake and feel very sorry about it. Weappy has nothing to do with this - it was just a personal mistake on our side.

Again: We are really sorry about that.

TL;DR: We (EuroVideo) made an unfortunate mistake which pushed the release to August 2 2016, please do not blame the developers for it.

Jan Binsmaier
Director Games EuroVideo

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.

This Is the Police will be available for digital download on PC, Mac and Linux for $14.99, and also be released on PS4 and Xbox One later this year.