Introduction

If you're in the mood for a game that asks you to manage a city full of problems while slowly peeling the moral skin off a man whose best career move is apparently to golf and brood, This Is the Police on Switch is your noir-flavored sandwich. You play Jack Boyd, a sixty-year-old police chief with the kind of voice that makes cigarettes sound like character development (voiced by Jon St. John, for anyone who likes their cop narration salted with Duke Nukem energy). The setup is deliciously grim: Boyd has 180 days before forced retirement, and rather than quietly knit his pension into a respectable nest egg, he decides to try to squirrel away half a million dollars - by whatever means necessary. The Switch version gives you all the bent-coin charm of the original release: an isometric city map, text-and-image story beats, tactical call dispatching, and gut-wrenching choices where the best outcome often looks like the least disgusting one. It's the sort of game that will ask you to call in SWAT and then ask whether you sold your soul to the mafia for a chest of ill-gotten cash. It's not the cheeriest commute, but it is compelling in the way a car crash with witty subtitles is compelling.

Gameplay

Gameplay in This Is the Police is a slow-burn affair that trades twitch reflexes for spreadsheet-level guilt. Each day you are presented with a map of Freeburg and a rotating menu of problems: domestic violence, robberies, gang wars, fires, and the occasional kitten stuck in a tree if the city's mood is feeling merciful. Every call that comes in needs to be prioritized and matched with officers from your roster. Each cop has stats and, crucially, political leanings - which is a neat twist that turns squad composition into a tiny psychological game of 'who do you want arguing about civic virtue while a suspect runs into traffic?' The real-time management layer is where most of the fun (and frustration) lives on the Switch. You have to decide how many officers to send to an incident, what equipment to deploy, and whether to stash a few for a potentially worse crime down the line. Overcommit and you'll be short-handed later; undercommit and property, paychecks, and occasionally lives will be lost. The game nudges you toward ethical compromises by dangling a simple, blunt goal: make $500,000 in 180 days. That number is both motivating and morally corrosive - very effective design if your aim is to make players feel increasingly murky about their life choices. Where This Is the Police gets interesting is the mafia angle. The local crime bosses will offer you opportunities to turn a blind eye, to funnel protection money, and to do favors that sound reasonable until you remember what 'reasonable' means inside a corruption racket. Accepting leads to more cash, but also shifts the narrative and sometimes the fate of people you might have liked. The deputy Francis Kendrick, a now-disgraced ally, and the competing criminal figures like Christopher Sand and Vicus Varga, form a messy web of 'choose your moral poison' that the game uses to earn its narrative weight. You also get to play detective occasionally. Some segments switch to investigation mechanics where you piece together clues to nail a serial killer or untangle a politically sensitive scandal. These bits are satisfying and give the story some teeth - they show the game isn't just a numbers exercise but a casebook of small tragedies. The political pressures escalate: officers take sides in city politics between Mayor Rogers and Eugene "Robespierre" Chaffee, and internal discord means you can't just squad-send without thinking about unit cohesion. Send a mixed-opinion squad and you'll get poor results. Promote rats - informants - in exchange for intel, and you risk losing trust and money. It's a tight little system of cause and consequence. On the Switch, controls translate well: menus are manageable via Joy-Con or touchscreen if you prefer handheld mode. The pace of the game lends itself to portable play; you can be philosophical and/or corrupt in 20-30 minute bursts while eating cereal. However, repetition is a legitimate complaint. The loop of days can feel grindy by the halfway mark, especially if you find yourself making the same decisions and watching similar cutscenes. Critics noted that after 20 in-game days the mechanical novelty starts to wear thin, and by day 100 the goal-posts can blur. The story is the engine that keeps things moving, but it sometimes pulls so hard on that engine that the management side feels like a chore instead of a co-conspirator. Decisions also impact multiple endings, giving a respectable replay value if you want to see how different combinations of greed, loyalty, and bad haircuts play out. The endings are bleak, satisfying, and deliberately unheroic: whether you side with the incumbent mayor (and keep the cash) or with the idealistic challenger (and get payed in symbolism and one unfortunate dollar), Jack Boyd's final chapter is not going to be in a feel-good pamphlet. The moral consequences are the point, so if you're allergic to ambiguity, this is not the game for you. If you're looking for a fast-action police sim, move along; This Is the Police treats law enforcement as an organizational, political, and moral puzzle. On the Switch the mix of strategy, narrative choice, and noir atmosphere is portable, which is exactly the sort of thing you want when you need to contemplate corruption between classes.

Graphics

Visually the game rocks an aesthetic that's somewhere between a pulp graphic novel and a chilly '80s cop drama poster. The isometric map of Freeburg is stylized rather than photorealistic, which suits the game's tone - you want to feel like you're orchestrating a city-sized diorama of moral decay, not watching motion-captured people sigh in HD. Reviewers praised the visual style and sound design; PC Gamer called it "gorgeous," and that sentiment carries over to the Switch. The narrative interludes are a highlight: moody stills paired with narrative text, punctuated by Jon St. John's gravelly delivery. Sound and voice acting elevate what could have been a dry pile of decisions into something cinematic. There are no fireworks of technical wizardry here; the Switch port doesn't re-invent the wheel graphically, but it reproduces the game's atmosphere faithfully. If your expectations are for flashy particle systems and 4K textures, you will be disappointed; if your expectations are for stylish presentation and strong vocal performances, you're in for a treat.

Conclusion

This Is the Police on Nintendo Switch is a thoughtful, occasionally infuriating game about compromise, small cruelties, and the economics of municipal ruin. Its strengths are a gripping central story, superb voice work from Jon St. John, and a design that makes each dispatch a small ethical riff. The weaknesses - repetition in the midgame and a tendency to lean too hard on narrative beats at the expense of mechanical variety - are the reasons it received mixed reviews (the Switch Metacritic sits around the mid-60s). That translates to a game that is more memorable than it is endlessly replayable for everyone. If you like your strategy slow, morally complicated, and narratively charged, you should pick it up. If you prefer your cops to be heroic, your gameplay to keep surprising you, or your endings to come with a participation trophy, this won't be your favorite companion on the commute. I scored it a 6.5 out of 10: an engaging, stylish, slightly tarnished gem - the sort of game that makes you feel just a little bit dirty for enjoying it. Which, frankly, seems like the point.

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