Newton’s third law of motion said that for every action, there has to be an equal and opposite reaction. My theory is that for every moderately good simulator in a subgenre, there needs to be an equal and opposite addressing to balance the universe. For all the advancements we’ve got in simulators like Euro Truck and Farming Sim, or even Supermarket and Gas Station Sim, you need those games that just so happen to remind you how this genre used to be. Enter Z-Software and Aerosoft GmbH, the combination behind 2015’s Autobahn Police Simulator.

Highway Police Simulator (HWPS) is a game (duh) that is about as well made as a 40-car pile-up on the I-95. From the first moment to the point it practically broke me, I wanted to play practically anything else. I hear The Day Before seemed to be in a slightly better state in that someone thought it might work. If anyone with two working brain cells thought Highway Police Simulator was finished by the day it was released, I want to have a word with the person that stands outside of their padded cell because that level of insanity should be illegal to be pushed on to the general public.

Harsh statements aside, Highway Police Simulator either runs poorly and looks like a pile of sick or runs poorly and looks even worse. I say this as I played on a 40-series RTX, I-7, 32GB RAM system which meets or exceeds the recommended requirements and ran at a pique of 18 frames per second on ultra. On the lowest possible graphical preset with minor changes, in which I’ve observed several questionable graphical problems, I’ve seen highs of 54 frames per second and an average of maybe 38. This speaks nothing to the level of AI, the bugs, the general feeling of gameplay, and overall (lack of) quality.

A “German Simulator” in more than just name, Z-Software, and Aerosoft GmbH’s Highway Police Simulator won’t compare to Aesir Interactive and astragon Entertainment’s Police Simulator: Patrol Officers. That also is a bit buggy and lacks overall Triple-A quality, or the Triple-A quality you expect, but at least it is fun, intuitive, and interesting. HWPS is clunky, too ambitious for the talent or scope behind it, and generally broken from the word go. On the early narcotics bust, I took the suggested car, had sirens and lights blaring, and still driver-less cars saw fit to ram the car into barriers and get stuck.

Sounds inoffensive, right? I could put the arrestee in the back of the cop car, but for love nor money, I wasn’t getting in the front seat. That includes after nudging both the driver-less SUV of which nudged the cop car into the barrier out of the way by crouching under it and doing the Farming Simulator 2013 special. Before the SUV pushed my car into the wall, my car decided to mount another when it ran full speed through an intersection and hit the cop car with flashing lights and sirens, which could have totaled the car. If that’s the case, why isn’t it a mission fail state?

This was one early instance not even an hour into Highway Police Simulator. Rushing to a traffic incident I was doing the very smart thing of sticking to the highway to get somewhere, only to clip an invisible piece of barrier, be flung under the world, have the car totaled, and be reset back to the nearest prison. Hold on, it gets worse. Total damage results in making your cop car inaccessible at 25/100… I assume percent or points of damage. So say you accidentally got out, you are miles away from civilization and have no way of driving a somewhat drivable car if you stay in it. Seems odd.

You play as the blandest cop this side of a CBS midweek drama who either was touched by a priest and thus joined the force or you cosplay as Kenny Johnson’s Dominique Luca. Wanting to play more into an RPG (minus the survival elements), either option gives you certain buffs and debuffs. Realistically, it doesn’t matter because you’ll quickly shut the game down and never open it after the first laggy, slow, boring action sequence takes place. Lucky for you, that’s only 10 minutes in.

Late for work and starting work at a prison, you are racing to catch up with a prison transport convoy which just so happens to be taken down by armed thugs who are trained like Navy SEALs, apparently. Committed to a vehicle interdiction, the armed gang flips the leading car, your car pulling rear security (poorly), and a prison bus like it was a Grand Theft Auto Online heist, but just a touch more annoying. Leaving no slow-motion action for Michael Bay, the gang breaking out a money launderer explosive-breach the door. A door I’ve seen an angry 12-year-old kick and destroy.

To say Highway Police Simulator thinks of itself as something grander than it is would be an understatement. Quick-traveling back to the hotel a quarter of a mile away from the station after that under-the-world exploration session, I encountered another bug, this one completely beyond comprehension. I ran back and ran straight to the garage, knowing I could replace my broken car with a fresh one from there, or so I thought. Instead of going straight to the garage menu itself, I hit “traverse” taking me inside the station’s underground entrance. After that, I decided to attempt to enter the garage menu which resulted in every door from working.

Again, I can make this worse, as the bug not only stopped doors from functioning, but the pause menu also stopped showing up. To say Highway Police Simulator is broken, ill-fit for purpose, generally ugly, and downright shocking from top to tail is selling the dramatically poor quality a little too short. On one of the random missions available by simply asking for the radio dispatch, I was called to an incident of someone running a traffic stop. Spending 10 minutes getting across the bland map, I was forced into using the radial menu button to indicate the driver to pull over.

Like most radial menus, you use the left analog stick to select what you want. This is the very same stick you use to move your admittedly floaty car. I’ve not seen driving this bad since Watchdogs (1). So not only depending on which direction you have to press in are you veering off into the wilderness, but asking this driver to “pull over” led him to stop abruptly in the middle of the road, a stop so abrupt I crashed into him because of course I’m right behind him. That’s a mission-fail state, apparently.

Not only is there a better game in the same field, I think maybe an asset-flipped game could have done better. Not morally, but certainly in terms of quality. There is an attempt from Z-Software to make HWPS into a full game, with a fully voiced cast of characters, a branching story, and so on, but the ambition far outreaches the studio’s abilities.

The point at which I gave up on trying to seriously review Highway Police Simulator was the point where I requested a random case, was sent on another excursion 10 miles across the map, and was met with the worst gunplay of any third-person game I’ve ever played. I’m including it among Mindjack and latter-day SOCOM games. Not only did I pull out a standard issue and bland Glock with a magazine capacity of a box of tic-tacs, but shooting a guy square between the eyes repeatedly only gives the poor sod a couple of momentary seizures.

Conveniently I can still make it worse, as in the station I pulled the gun out by the armory and proceeded to put four or five magazines full of tic-tacs through my partner’s chest and the almost offensively over-the-top Patrick o’Shooty-McShootface. I know gun laws are relaxed in the US, but even in this fictional California, you would have seen your officer’s body buried in the desert under enough lead to poison the entire world by the time that armory would have been emptied for shooting two cops.

I wish I could honestly say there was something about Highway Police Simulator that makes it worthwhile, but there isn’t. The story feels like it fell out of the bargain bin of CBS dramas, and that’s about as complimentary as I can get to HWPS because the voice acting or general model rigging by animators isn’t any better. The script feels like the first draft and the best editing suggestion I could give is to put it in the bin and start over.

With the exposition so loud it could be classed as an Orange Order march, the characters aren’t likable and their general feeling seems to be a monotonal “I’m fine.” There really is nothing redeeming or charming about Highway Police Simulator that pulls you through its poor design, genuinely awful optimization (30GB for what?), bland and uninteresting story, weak performances, and the mountain of bugs that you’ll experience just doing the simplest parts of gameplay.

There are no consequences, no (proper) fail state, and no actionable reason to try and be a good cop. Despite wanting to be a game about serious law and order, crime seeing consequences, playing as “the good guys,” and doing (as the Steam description notes) “authentic police work of the American Highway Patrol,” there is no reason to do good, play properly, and play like HWPS is actually a simulator. It is bloody awful, runs poorly no matter what, and generally is made about as solid as a chocolate digestive dipped to wherever Bin Laden’s body is buried.

A PC review copy of Highway Police Simulator was provided by Aerosoft GmbH for this review.

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Highway Police Simulator

$29.99

1

Score

1.0/10

Pros

• I can now stop playing it forever.

Cons

• Awful optimization.
• Generally ugly.
• Horrendously designed.
• Too much ambition, not enough talent.