In The Precinct, players investigate crimes, chase down suspects, and take on dangerous gangs that control the streets. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.

The Precinct Review Overview

What is The Precinct?

The Precinct is an open-world, neon-noir action game that puts you in the shoes of a rookie cop in the crime-ridden streets of Averno City. Combining elements of crime-solving, patrolling, and gang warfare, the game offers players a unique experience where they’re tasked with cleaning up a city overrun by corruption and lawlessness. You’ll step into the role of Nick Cordell Jr., a young officer following in the footsteps of his late, legendary father who was once a beacon of hope for the force.

The Precinct features:
　⚫︎　Crime Investigation
　⚫︎　Patrol System
　⚫︎　Neon-Noir Aesthetic
　⚫︎　Open-World Exploration
　⚫︎　Dynamic World Interaction

Digital Storefronts
Steam		Epic		PlayStation		Xbox
Price			$29.99

The Precinct Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
Engaging Crime-Solving Mechanics Immersive Open-World Exploration Thrilling Car Chases	Interruptions During Active Crimes Storyline Simplicity Occasional Rigid Camera Angles

The Precinct Overall Score - 76/100

The Precinct is a neon-noir cop simulator that puts you in the shoes of rookie officer Nick Cordell Jr., patrolling the gritty streets of Averno City. Its gameplay shines with engaging patrols, crime-solving, and high-speed chases, though occasional issues and mission interruptions can be frustrating. The story, while functional, follows a predictable path without much emotional depth. Despite these flaws, its strong visuals, satisfying mechanics, and decent replayability make it a solid choice for fans of sandbox crime games.

The Precinct Story - 7/10

The story in The Precinct follows rookie cop Nick Cordell Jr., who is trying to follow in the footsteps of his late father, a legendary officer. While the premise itself is solid, the execution of the narrative feels a bit formulaic. The protagonist has clear motivations, but the emotional depth and complexity of the story could be deeper. The plot moves at a steady pace, but the story doesn’t necessarily offer many surprises. It serves its purpose without standing out as particularly groundbreaking.

The Precinct Gameplay - 8/10

The gameplay in The Precinct is largely driven by patrolling the streets of Averno, solving crimes, and taking down gangs. The core loop of exploring, responding to crimes, and collecting evidence is satisfying, with a decent amount of variety in your daily assignments. The car chases and detective work are standout features, adding depth and excitement. Some issues arise with AI and mission interruptions, but overall, the game’s mechanics are solid and fun.

The Precinct Visuals - 8/10

The game's neon-noir aesthetic shines, with detailed cityscapes and atmospheric lighting that immerse you in the grim world of Averno. The visuals are crisp, with a style that captures the essence of the 1980s. Performance is generally strong, with minimal glitches or frame drops, ensuring smooth gameplay. However, there are moments when the camera angles can feel odd, breaking immersion slightly. Despite this, the environments are memorable, and the visual design fits the game's tone well.

The Precinct Audio - 7/10

The audio in The Precinct does a great job of enhancing the atmosphere, with a moody soundtrack that sets the tone for the game’s world. The music is not particularly standout but serves its purpose in drawing you deeper into the experience. Voice acting is present for key NPC interactions, adding weight to important story moments. However, it would have been nice to hear more interactions from pedestrians and bystanders in the open world, adding more life to the environment.

The Precinct Value for Money - 8/10

The game offers a solid amount of content for its price. With a variety of missions, progression systems, and the ability to customize your patrols and assignments, there's enough to keep you engaged for hours. While there are a few repetitive elements, the game provides a rich experience that justifies its cost. The replayability, especially with the gang system and open-ended mission structure, ensures there's plenty to do post-launch. If you’re a fan of sandbox crime games, The Precinct offers strong value for money.

The Precinct Review: Primo Police Noir—Just Needs Polish

Averno City is a neon-lit nightmare—where the rain never quite washes away the grime, and the shadows cling to the alleys like bad memories. It’s a metropolis caught in a slow, steady collapse, where crime isn’t just a problem—it’s part of the ecosystem. In this sprawling, rain-soaked chaos, you step into the shoes of Nick Cordell Jr., a rookie officer with the Averno City Police Department (ACPD), chasing a legacy left behind by his father—a legendary cop who died with a badge on his chest.

But The Precinct isn’t just a brooding story about a rookie cop. It’s a sandbox action game that hands you a badge, a gun, and a city full of bad decisions waiting to happen. Imagine the chaos of Grand Theft Auto, but instead of being the outlaw, you’re the one trying to keep the peace—an officer sworn to serve and protect, patrolling the streets, responding to crimes in progress, and chasing down criminals in high-speed pursuits. Averno isn’t just a backdrop—it’s a living, breathing world where trouble can find you on any corner, where every alley has a story, and every patrol is a gamble.

The Precinct manages to capture the tension of being a good cop in a bad city. It’s a sandbox where chaos is always just around the corner, and where even the best intentions can get twisted in the rain-drenched shadows of Averno City.

A Neo-Noir Playground

Let’s talk about the first thing you notice in The Precinct, Averno City itself. Even before you take your first step as Nick Cordell Jr., even before the sirens wail and the rain slicks the pavement, Averno pulls you in. It’s a city straight out of a neon-noir fever dream—an urban sprawl caught between the glow of neon lights and the shadows of crime-ridden alleys. The city is a character in its own right, dripping with atmosphere, and it’s clear that the developers wanted this place to feel alive… or, at the very least, alive and rotting.

The neon-noir aesthetic is the first thing that grips you. Streets glisten under the glow of reddish purple neon signs. The city feels like a place out of time—a love letter to the 1980s but with a surreal, cinematic twist. Driving down the main streets of Averno, you’re hit with a kaleidoscope of colors—pinks, purples, cold blues—while the outer districts pull you into shadowed slums and abandoned industrial zones, each with its own personality.

This visual style doesn’t just stop at the streets. It seeps into the character designs, the gang members you hunt, and even the police precinct itself. Your fellow officers have that grizzled look of people who’ve spent too many years trying to clean up a city that never stays clean. The gang members, on the other hand, are an almost exaggerated gallery of misfits—leather jackets and bright mohawks. It’s stylized, sure, but it works. It gives Averno a sense of identity, a place that you can almost smell and hear just by looking at it.

And speaking of hearing—the audio design is good but doesn’t quite match the excellence of the visuals. It’s not a soundtrack that will have you humming along, but it’s atmospheric. It’s there when you need it—swelling during intense pursuits, fading to a low hum when you’re just cruising the city. But for all its moody brilliance, the audio design stumbles in one key area—voice work. Not that the voice acting is bad, mind you—it’s just sparse. Your fellow officers and a few key NPCs have voice lines, but for a city as lively as Averno, it can feel eerily quiet. Passersby don’t shout out as you barrel down the street, and suspects don’t plead or panic when they’re cornered. The criminals you arrest are often reduced to text boxes and silent gestures, which can feel jarring when the rest of the city is so alive with atmosphere.

Imagine racing through a narrow alley in pursuit of a suspect, only to hear nothing but the hum of your engine and the distant wail of a siren. No shouts, no desperate footsteps echoing through the night. It’s a missed opportunity. With the right voice work, the city could have felt even more alive—hustlers cursing as you flash your badge, pedestrians calling out in surprise as you shoulder past them, suspects yelling for backup as you close in. Even if it became repetitive, it would have added a layer of immersion to the city’s chaos.

But when it comes to performance, The Precinct is rock solid. The game runs smoothly, frame rate drops are rare, even during high-speed chases, and the world remains crisp and detailed whether you’re speeding down the neon-lit avenues or stalking through a shadowed alley.

That said, the game isn’t perfect in the visuals department. Sometimes the camera can be a little too eager to show off the world it’s built, forcing you into awkward angles—especially during certain action sequences. For example, in the heat of a pursuit, the camera might swing around to give you a "dramatic" view of the chase, but instead of feeling cinematic, it just makes it harder to see the road ahead. It’s not a constant problem, but it’s one of those little annoyances that remind you that style sometimes came at the expense of function.

But these are minor issues in an otherwise striking visual and audio experience. The Precinct knows what it wants to be—a neon-soaked, rain-drenched dive into the grimy world of Averno City—and it commits to that aesthetic with style. Every corner of the city feels deliberately designed, every shadow thick with atmosphere, and even if the audio doesn’t always rise to the same heights, it’s hard not to be pulled in by the sheer vibe of the world.

Patrolling the Streets

Your first day as Nick Cordell Jr. feels like being handed a leaky boat in a storm and being told to steer. But that’s the thrill of it, Averno City is alive, a chaotic, ever-shifting playground of crime, and your badge is both your shield and your curse.

The core gameplay of The Precinct is built around a simple, yet addictive loop: patrol, respond, investigate, and enforce. It sounds straightforward, but in a city as unpredictable as Averno, it’s anything but. Patrols are the heartbeat of your daily routine. You can choose to walk the beat, getting up close and personal with the city’s darker corners, or slide behind the wheel of your squad car, sirens blaring as you weave through traffic, each red light a suggestion. And for those who prefer a bird’s-eye view of chaos, there’s the police helicopter, a flying symbol of authority and a perfect perch for chasing down fleeing suspects.

But Averno City isn’t content to let you just cruise by. Crime isn’t a scheduled event here, it’s an ever-present storm. Sometimes, command will call for officers on the ground, dispatching you to a reported crime in progress. Other times, you stumble into trouble on your own—an armed robbery gone wrong, a gang shootout tearing through a quiet neighborhood, or a desperate thief sprinting through the rain-slick streets. You’re never far from chaos, and every encounter is a test of your skills.

And that’s where the game’s arrest system comes into play. Unlike other open-world titles where brute force can solve most problems, The Precinct demands that you earn your arrests. You can’t just slam suspects to the ground and call it a day, police brutality is a fast ticket to losing experience points and never moving up the ranks. Instead, you have to properly subdue suspects, reading them their rights, ensuring that your actions are justified, and sometimes even negotiating them into surrendering. The game rewards restraint and professionalism, making you think twice before drawing your weapon.

But when restraint fails—when sirens scream, and the streets become a blur—car chases are where The Precinct truly shines. There’s something exhilarating about slamming the gas, weaving through traffic, neon lights flashing by in a kaleidoscope of chaos. Pursuing suspects through tight alleys, avoiding oncoming traffic, and hearing the radio crackle with updates of the suspect’s last whereabouts—it’s a pulse-pounding dance of speed and skill. Averno City is a maze, and you learn its shortcuts and tight corners not through a map, but by living them, one chase at a time.

Still, all this day-to-day chaos is only the surface. Beneath the random street crimes and adrenaline-pumping chases is a deeper, more methodical game—the gang system. The city is crawling with criminal organizations, each carving out a piece of Averno as their own, and it’s your job to bring them down. But this isn’t just a matter of kicking in doors. Instead, The Precinct turns you into a detective—collecting evidence from crime scenes, piecing together clues, and building a case against the various gang members who operate in the shadows.

It starts small—a scrap of evidence here once in a while—but as you dig deeper, those seemingly random street crimes start connecting. Arrests lead to bigger targets, and eventually, you work your way up the criminal ladder. It’s a slow, methodical process, but it’s a satisfying one, turning what could’ve been mindless chaos into a narrative of your own making. You’re not just a cop in Averno, you’re the one drawing a line between the gangs and the streets they claim.

And yet, for all its thrilling highs, the gameplay isn’t without its frustrations. Your partner, an essential part of your patrols, is a mixed bag. Sometimes they’re a perfect backup, helping you take down suspects, covering you in shootouts, even arresting criminals while you handle the chaos. But other times, they’re a liability—letting suspects slip away while you’re busy, or worse, standing around like a ghost while you do all the work. It’s an inconsistency that can turn a tense situation into an exercise in frustration.

The game’s dispatch system is another double-edged sword. Being called to a new, more urgent crime while you’re still dealing with an active scene sounds like an exciting way to simulate the chaos of a real city. But in practice, it can become maddening—especially when it means abandoning suspects who are ready to be arrested just because a new marker has popped up. You’ll find yourself in situations where a suspect is literally already cuffed, only for the game to decide that they’re suddenly not your problem. It’s a system that feels at odds with the sense of professionalism the game otherwise tries to promote.

But those frustrations are often drowned out by the sheer variety and tension of Averno’s streets. One moment, you’re handling a simple littering case, and the next, you’re skidding through the streets in a high-speed pursuit, radio crackling with updates, your partner yelling for backup. And at the end of each shift, as you return to the precinct, count your experience points, and spend them on new abilities—physical strength, combat skills, driving proficiency, or policing techniques—you can feel yourself growing from a nervous rookie to a seasoned officer, one hard-earned arrest at a time.

There’s a rhythm to it all—patrol, pursue, investigate, enforce. And in that rhythm is the beating heart of The Precinct. A game that isn’t just about catching criminals, but about finding your place in a city that seems hell-bent on staying broken.

Progression and Customization

At the heart of this customization is the experience point system, a tangible measure of your growth as an officer. Everything you do in Averno, from arresting suspects to solving crimes, earns you experience points. But these points aren’t just a meaningless number—they’re your currency for progression. Each time you level up, you’re rewarded with a skill token, and this token can be invested in one of four critical attributes: Physical, Policing, Vehicle, and Combat.

The Physical attribute is all about your endurance and strength. Investing here means Nick becomes tougher, able to endure longer chases on foot, handle himself better in scuffles, and even perform those dramatic tackles that end a suspect’s sprint for freedom. It’s a must for players who love the direct, hands-on approach—those who find themselves in the thick of street brawls or prefer to wrestle a suspect into cuffs without needing their weapon.

Policing, on the other hand, is all about de-escalation, better back up and intel. If you lean into this attribute, you become a master of handling tense situations without violence. Suspects are more likely to surrender when confronted and even the most chaotic crime scenes become more manageable. For players who take pride in being a by-the-book officer, this is where you invest.

But of course, Averno City’s streets aren’t just for walking. The Vehicle attribute is your key to dominating the roads. Higher Vehicle skills mean greater ability to outmaneuver suspects in those pulse-pounding car chases. You won’t just unlock better performance—you’ll gain access to a growing fleet of vehicles, each one suited to a different style of policing. Starting with your standard squad car, you can eventually unlock SUVs for durability, tactical units for heavy confrontations, and even commandeer vehicles.

Finally, there’s Combat—a skill set that turns you from a standard cop into a one-man SWAT team. High Combat skill means better aim, faster reloads, and even special takedown moves that can turn the tide of a confrontation. Whether you’re cornered by a gang of armed thugs or responding to a shootout, investing in Combat means you’re never outgunned. But what’s clever about The Precinct is that it never lets you become an invincible action hero—your Combat skills are still bound by the rules of law enforcement. Reckless violence can cost you experience, and even with the best aim in the world, you’re still expected to uphold the law.

But the real beauty of this system isn’t just the attributes themselves—it’s how they work together to shape your approach. You’re not locked into a single path. Want to be a powerhouse who can chase down suspects and talk them into surrendering without ever firing a shot? Invest in Physical and Policing. Want to be a high-speed daredevil who can turn any pursuit into a cinematic chase? Double down on Vehicle and Combat. The game doesn’t tell you how to be a cop—it hands you the tools and lets you decide.

And the more you grow, the more the city itself opens up to you. As you level up, you gain access to a wide variety of vehicles—patrol cars, 4x4’s, station wagons, even helicopters for when you need a bird’s-eye view of chaos. Each of these vehicles isn’t just for show—they offer practical benefits depending on your style. A nimble cruiser might be perfect for tight alleyway pursuits, while a rugged 4x4 can handle the rougher districts of Averno without flinching. You even gain the ability to customize your vehicles, choosing different loadouts and siren types.

But it doesn’t end with vehicles. As you continue to climb the ranks, you unlock the ability to customize your daily assignments. You’re no longer just a rookie being told where to go and what to do, you become the officer who chooses their own path. Decide which districts you want to patrol, whether you want to focus on foot patrols, vehicular response, or even air support. You can even set the time of day for your shifts—choosing to tackle the nightlife of Averno’s Chinatown or the industrial districts under the pale morning light.

It’s this slow but steady evolution that keeps you hooked. Sure, the first few shifts can feel overwhelming—a flood of dispatch calls, suspects bolting in every direction, and crimes that seem to pop up faster than you can handle. But with each level you gain, each token you spend, and each new tool you unlock, that chaos starts to feel less like a nightmare and more like your personal playground. You’re not just surviving Averno—you’re mastering it.

Is The Precinct Worth It?

Crime Never Rests, and Neither Should You

The Precinct is a thrilling neon-noir cop experience that excels in its dynamic gameplay, atmospheric city, and immersive detective work, despite a few rough edges. When you step into the streets of Averno City, you’re not just playing a game—you’re living an 80s cop drama. The Precinct delivers a gripping sandbox experience, where you patrol a chaotic city, chase down criminals, and piece together evidence to bring down entire gangs. The rush of high-speed chases, the satisfaction of solving cases, and the steady climb through the police ranks give the gameplay a relentless energy that keeps you hooked.

The city itself is a standout—a moody, rain-drenched metropolis that feels alive, with neon signs, bustling streets, and tracks that pull you into the noir atmosphere. Whether you’re cruising the streets in your squad car, responding to radio calls, or hunting down gang leaders, Averno City is a playground of crime and justice. It’s a world you want to explore, a city that challenges you to keep the peace.

Customization is another strong point. As you level up, you shape Nick Cordell Jr. into the cop you want to be—improving your combat skills, unlocking new vehicles, and even choosing how your patrols unfold. The sense of growth and control is satisfying, making each shift feel like a step toward becoming a legend of the ACPD.

Of course, The Precinct isn’t perfect. The partner AI can be unreliable, and the dispatch system sometimes pulls you out of ongoing events. The story, while a solid backdrop for your crime-fighting, plays it safe—Nick Cordell Jr.’s journey of revenge and justice is engaging but rarely surprising. Yet these are minor flaws in a game that, at its core, is about the thrill of the chase, the satisfaction of cracking cases, and the weight of the badge. If you’re craving a neon-noir cop sandbox where you’re not just a bystander but the law itself, The Precinct is absolutely worth your time. A few rough edges can’t dim the brilliance of its rain-soaked streets, its tense chases, and the satisfying rush of bringing criminals to justice.

Digital Storefronts
Steam		Epic		PlayStation		Xbox
Price			$29.99

The Precinct FAQ

What Are The System Requirements of The Precinct?

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The Precinct Product Information

Title	THE PRECINCT
Release Date	May 13, 2025
Developer	Fallen Tree Games Ltd
Publisher	Kwalee
Supported Platforms	PC (Steam, Epic), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S
Genre	Sandbox, Action, Shooter
Number of Players	1
ESRB Rating	T
Official Website	The Precinct Website

Allisandra Reyes

I find joy in the adrenaline rush of horror games, but my thrill-seeking doesn't stop there. Beyond the digital realm, I like to take on the role of designated GM in TTRPGs.