Overview
This Is the Police 2 is Weappy Studio's 2018 follow-up to their acclaimed noir drama, published by THQ Nordic and available across PC, consoles, and mobile platforms. The game drops players into Sharpwood, a cold border town festering with smugglers, gang violence, and political noise, where new sheriff Lilly Reed (voiced by Sarah Hamilton of The Longest Journey fame) has to hold the line with a department full of men who resent taking orders from her. Fugitive criminal Jack Boyd (Jon St. John, the voice of Duke Nukem) enters the picture as an unlikely ally, and the tension between survival and principle drives the narrative forward.
The game resists easy categorization. It blends police department management, adventure storytelling, visual novel sequences, and turn-based tactical combat into something that feels genuinely distinct. None of those elements feel bolted on; each feeds into the others in ways that keep the pressure consistent from the opening hours through to the final act.
Gameplay and mechanics
Running the sheriff's department means more than just dispatching officers to calls. Each subordinate comes with a personality, a history, personal vices, and limits. One officer might show up hungover. Another might refuse a direct order based on prejudice. Managing these people requires reading them correctly and knowing when to push and when to back off.
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Key mechanics include:
- Officer skill and morale management
- Case investigation and evidence collection
- Suspect interrogation with multiple approaches
- Turn-based tactical combat on detailed maps
- Moral decision-making with systemic consequences
When a situation escalates into direct confrontation, the game shifts into turn-based tactical combat. There are no hit points here. A single bullet ends a cop's career (or life), which makes every firefight feel genuinely dangerous. Stealth approaches and non-lethal equipment are available, but the game doesn't always give you the luxury of a clean solution.
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World and setting
Sharpwood feels like a place with history that predates the player's arrival. The town's traditions lean toward the barbaric, its politics toward the ugly, and its residents toward self-preservation over cooperation. The writing doesn't romanticize any of it. Lilly Reed navigates a world that pushes back against her at every level, from the criminals on the street to the men supposedly working under her.
The noir atmosphere carries through the visual novel sequences, which use voiced dialogue and illustrated cutscenes to build character in ways that pure management games rarely attempt. The story earns its darker turns because the groundwork is laid carefully.
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Is the turn-based combat worth learning?
For players coming primarily from the management or visual novel side of things, the tactical combat sections might feel like a gear shift. They are more demanding than the rest of the game, requiring terrain awareness, squad composition decisions, and patience. The absence of a hit-point buffer means mistakes are permanent, which raises the stakes considerably.
That difficulty is intentional. The combat sections represent the moments when Lilly's department faces its most serious threats, and the tension of potentially losing an officer you've managed for hours makes those encounters land harder than a typical tactics game. Players who commit to understanding the system will find it rewarding rather than punishing.
Content and replayability
The investigation system adds another layer beyond combat and management. Collecting evidence, studying case files, and deciding how hard to push a suspect during interrogation all feed into outcomes that ripple through the broader story. Corrupt judges exist in Sharpwood, and whether to exploit that fact is one of many decisions the game leaves entirely to the player.
The multi-genre design means the experience stays varied across its runtime, cycling between management pressure, narrative beats, investigative puzzles, and tactical tension. Players drawn to story-driven strategy games with moral weight and permanent consequences will find This Is the Police 2 hits harder than most games that attempt even one of those things.
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