JohnBart

The creators of "American Fugitive" will release a police game on August 15 titled The Precinct. Similarly to their previous game, it has a GTA: Chinatown Wars-like perspective, and will apparently offer a nice mixture of everyday policing, 1980s crime drama spectacles (in the vein of Hill Street Blues), and a main revenge story plotline, all packed into an open-world city with procedurally generated callouts and traffic. Here's the release date trailer, if you are interested. Apart from The Precinct (which I'm personally really looking forward to playing), there's not much to choose from in the genre, unfortunately. Ready or Not is a great title, but focuses exclusively on SWAT engagements, while all the other police games I know about are typically budget titles with plenty of compromises to accept. Police Simulator: Patrol Officers is certainly a relaxing, if mundane depiction of US policing (with no high-risk callouts at all, so you cannot even justifiably discharge your pistol in that game). Police Simulator: Patrol Duty (the predecessor of Patrol Officers) also offers shootouts as well, but is a pretty buggy and barebones title. The Autobahn Police Simulator series is known to be a technical trainwreck and focusing solely on German highway patrol duties, while Enforcer: Police Crime Action is a diverse, if bare and buggy attempt in portraying small-town US policing. Frankly, when it comes to enjoyable US policing sandboxes, LSPD:FR is the best choice we've got, provided that you can set up the mod for your liking, and are not afraid of GTA: Online content updates... 😉

Great news, thanks for the quick update! 🙂

So it looks like that Astragon weren't discouraged by the fact that Police Simulator: Patrol Duty turned out to be a trainwreck, and are set out to publish a quasi-reboot of their "Police Simulator" series (with a new developer taking the helm, of course). So far, the engine and the assets look pretty similar (with Unreal Engine 4 powering the game, and most of the cityscape apparently being built with the same city asset pack that Patrol Duty used), but being the hopeless optimist, I'd love to think this attempt might turn out to be better than PS:PD, and thus might be worthy to attention. Specifically: - The car and character models already look a lot better. - The devs will launch the game in early access, and will keep it in-development for at least a year, promising frequent updates and community engagement, - Unlike PS:PD, they claim the game will feature a dynamic traffic and pedestrian system that'll organically generate random events, along with a great variety of callouts. - Like its predecessor, PO is also planned to feature a two-player co-op mode and night shifts as well. I'm not holding my breath here, but the developers already look a lot more transparent and open in communication than BigMoon ever did with Patrol Duty. If they prove to be indeed receptive of community feedback, and add extensive modding support to the game, this can actually turn out to be a decent police game, methinks. Any thoughts?

Wow, about time to get back to the world of LSPD:FR after a long hiatus. So glad to see that the mod is still being developed - the new update sounds awesome! 🙂

Yeah, well let's hope for the best then. As much as I love LSPDFR, setting up all the plugins and addons properly and handling all those GTA Online updates can certainly be tiresome in the long run, which wouldn't be the case with a well-made standalone patrol sim. Hope we'll get to see one released one day, either from Wingman, or from someone else. 😉

Why? It's an open world police game powered by Unreal Engine 4. Exactly what Police 10-13 claims to be. 😉 Also, it has 2-player co-op, something we cannot have in LSPD:FR. Can't argue with these, because what you write is completely true (vehicle handling is actually okay, but collision detection is really horrible, indeed). The city also looks rather bland, though the character and vehicle models are pretty solid I think (the car interiors are also well-made). But then again, the latest Police 10-13 gameplay videos don't look better either... 😉 Yeah, Astragon and Bigmoon certainly weren't on the same page (not just when it comes to release, but also during the entire development cycle - the last 1,5 years of development was carried out in utter silence). Still, this doesn't change the fact that Bigmoon managed to release an open world police sim powered by Unreal Engine 4 in three years, while Wingman couldn't produce any actual legit gameplay footage in 5... 😉 What do you mean it "looks nicer and seems close to an LSPDFR standalone"? They haven't even released any actual gameplay footage at all since the project was announced! The closest we got was the March dev update which quickly turned out to be a $100K Unreal Marketplace asset flip in its entirety (after 5 years of supposed development, no less). The fact that Matt Norman also amassed a large number of controversies in the past years doesn't put my confidence in the project either. Make no mistake, I'd also love to finally have a standalone police sim that offers the same polish and feature set that LSPDFR does, but I'm also pretty sure that given Wingman's track record, it won't be Police 10-13 that will fulfil these aspirations. That project is an exaggaration at its best (that won't end up better than Patrol Duty did, should it eventually get released), or a development hell pipe dream at its worst. Like it or not, Patrol Duty is currently the best standalone beat cop simulator we have on the market, despite all its bugs and fair share of issues (which of course tells a lot about the genre as well). That's why I hope Bigmoon can indeed push out those patches they are promising in the game's Steam boards.

So, a new police game has hit Steam which is basically everything Police 10-13 has aspired to be. Patrol Duty runs on Unreal Engine 4 and features a fictional open-world US city, offering you the chance to climb the ranks from Cadet to Captain, and dispense your own brand of justice by enforcing traffic regulations, searching for wanted suspects, and answering callouts ranging from crime scene investigation to firefights in armed robberies. It's also playable in 2-player-coop. FirstThirtyMinutes, Jeff Favignano or TheNorthernAlex (among others) already made several videos on it. Too bad that the game is horribly buggy at its current state, something which is rather surprising (or not...) considering it was originally slated to release in January 2018. Here's hoping the developers can indeed deliver the massive fixes they are promising, because despite all its shortcomings, it still looks more enjoyable than any other standalone police patrol game we've got so far. Though that's not quite the achievement. 😄

Welcome aboard, I hope you'll have a nice stay here. 😉 Granted, installing the mod and all the juicy plugins may take some time, but it is certainly worth the effort. Make sure to take a look around the troubleshooting topics in case of any problems, and also take the time to read all the ReadMes. 😉

If you are playing the latest version of GTA 4 or EfLC (1.0.8.0 or 1.1.3.0, respectively), you need to downgrade to the previous version (GTA IV 1.0.7.0 or EfLC 1.1.2.0), as the mod and the required scripthook only works with those versions.

With every update, the hype intensifies further. It's so awesome reading about all these improvements the team have made - thank you for all the effort and hard work you've put into this, I'm pretty sure we'll be blown away by the end results. 😮

The hype is getting higher with each such Preview topic. Exciting details here, thank you for sharing them! 🙂

This sounds so awesome! It was so strange seeing that my own character looks so cool dressed up with EUP while the NPC officers were all lower-quality stormtroopers. Now the only thing I need is the character creator's support to generate not just my own officer, but partner NPCs as well, and this is gonna be the best mod ever. Many thanks for all the hard work you guys are pouring into this. This is gonna be an absolutely robust release.

Really looking forward to this release, it will provide me a good opportunity to jump back to LSPDFR after a long hiatus. Many thanks to everyone involved in the development!

Well, I know that Flipswitch Games plans EmergeNYC to be multiplayer-compatible as well, with 32 players (police officers, firefighters and EMTs) playing in the same session, either in RTS or in TPS mode. However, the game is still in pre-alpha, even though the devs frequently update the game with meaningful patches, so I think this is something you should keep an eye on for 2018. I'll certainly do. :) Excalibur Publishing also supports a similar title, called Flashing Lights, with the difference that this is planned to be a TPS-only experience, as far as I understand (and set in a fictional location instead of New York City). I'd be a bit careful with this one though, because Excalibur, as a publisher, has a notorious track record in abandoning their games (Euro Ship Simulator, Enforcer and World Ship Sim are just a couple of titles in recent years that they simply left to die). I'd wait for at least the early access start (due in 2018 Q1) and check the first Steam reviews on how serious the project looks like. Police Simulator 18 will also support a two-player cooperative mode upon release. Apart from these, I'm afraid the only alternatives left are the more complicated ones. You can either try organizing an LCPDFR session in GTA IV v1.0.7.0 (your best bet, I think), or delve into the modding scene of games that have police RPing aspects. You already mentioned GMod - other than that, I know that Operation Flashpoint (an awfully great, and awfully old favorite tactical shooter from 2001, currently called ArmA: Cold War Assault) and ArmA 3 have/had such policing mods. In case of Operation Flashpoint, there was a pretty good, Czech Republic-based police package (Nogova Police Forces), with regular officers and tactical units, along with a wide variety of patrol and armored response vehicles. The downside is that you need to set up your own scenarios with the in-game editor if you want to use them to your liking, because the only mission I found that plays like a police patrol is this one. That said, you may want to give this one a try, as Operation Flashpoint literally runs on any PC, no matter your hardware, and you can find a lot of tutorials online on how to use the editor, or how to create multiplayer missions with this package if you want online RP with your friends. In case of ArmA3, there is an RP mod called Altis Life, where I know you can play either as a civilian, a criminal, or a law enforcement officer. According to the website, this may be more in line with what you are looking for, the problem is that ArmA3 is pretty much of a resource hog, so if you have problems running GTA IV or GTA V on your rig, you will definitely face performance issues with this game, I'm afraid. That's all I know, but I hope these help you out. Happy New Year! ;)