Contraband Police Review
Contraband Police
Release Date: March 8, 2023
Publisher: PlayWay
Developer: Crazy Rocks
Platforms: PC
MSRP: 19.99
“Immersion” is something games (and gamers) put at a premium. It’s the idea that a game should draw you in, make you a part of its world, force you to meet it on its terms. It’s something given lip-service in larger games and (in some cases) forced to the point of breaking utterly in much smaller games. Contraband Police on the other hand nails it perfectly. Tasking you with the relatively low-stakes and high-danger job of running a border post in the country of Acaristan, the game expertly stretches each moment, letting you feel the beautiful but empty days of running the checkpoint intercut with sudden, explosive violence and regular police work. The tension and long stretches of running a checkpoint and the paranoid terror of the criminals who run the area work beautifully, making Contraband Police a game that, while rough-edged, is well worth the time and energy.
Contraband Police tasks you with running the border checkpoint at Acaristan, a fictional country based on USSR-era Europe. You check if everyone’s papers are in order, make sure no one’s smuggling contraband through the checkpoint, and deal with the occasional border raid from the local bandits. In between, you fight off bandits who raid your checkpoint and take on jobs for the Acaristan Police.
This sets up a routine loop: You check papers, accept or deny entry, and hope for smugglers, raiders, or an ambush to break up the monotony. Things get more complicated once you need to check cargo and issue damage reports on cars, ands each chapter introduces new guidelines to follow and new rules to check for. It’s fairly standard for games of this type, similar to a less tense Papers, Please. In between catching smugglers, you advance the story by shutting down a criminal conspiracy or choosing to side with them against the government. There are tense chases down back roads, occasional bandit ambushes, and all-out gunfights where you move from room to room clearing out bad guys in balaclavas. There’s even a logic puzzle/murder mystery thrown in for good measure.
It’s the stretches between these missions that make the game what it is. When you’re on your fifth check of some truck’s cargo and you hope this time there’s a reason for you to look around the car and unpack all some guy’s luggage. When you notice your subordinates wandering around the post and smoking. The game stretches out the moments of doing nothing until the player wonders if they’re going to do something drastic just to break up the monotony.
That isn’t to say the process of checking cars and drivers isn’t interesting, but the lack of tension and the routine nature of the work become routine. It informs everything else in the game. Contraband Police immerses you in its world through that routine. You start hoping that there’ll be a bandit ambush to break up your umpteenth prisoner transport or contraband drop-off. You start dashing when the post’s phone rings with a new mission that’ll take you to one of the eerily remote locales in the area by the border post.
You start to wonder what would happen if you weren’t quite so good at your job, or at least willing to skim a little off the top.
This is the push and pull of Contraband Police, and what makes the morality system so interesting— it’s not the usual binary choice of “kill puppies/give candy to children” that so many games use, but a much simpler question of how loyal do you wish to be to a government that genuinely doesn’t seem to care? The Bloodfist Rebels might be a brutal gang one step up from the mob and their smugglers, but are they really any worse than the government that sent you to the boondocks to make sure truck drivers weren’t using forged passports? Even the guards at the contraband station and the prison tend to wander around and look like they’re kind of resigned to their jobs rather than happy to do them.
It makes a lot more sense than the average bureaucracy simulator’s mechanics. If you read the flavor text, all your checkpoint officers were banished for minor offenses, essentially kicked to desk jobs because they were either too good or too incompetent for Acaristan to deal with. You start the game living in a tin shack with propaganda posters and decaying fly-strips inside. Why wouldn’t you take a bribe? Who are you protecting?
All of this is backed up by the side-missions and more action-focused mechanics. Fighting it out with the bandits and raiders is dynamic and feels like a desperate stand or an ‘80s action movie, with you trying to clear rooms and fight an ever-advancing number of bandits running through the mountains and forests while you try to fend them off with a limited number of bullets. They even use cover mechanics and flanking maneuvers, just to show you how outnumbered and outgunned you are. When you manage to win a gunfight, it feels earned.
Though this is where the problems start to show. In the gunfights, you’re frequently dogged by dodgy hit detection that feels less like you’re using a cheap government-issue gun and more like a bug in the code. The rebels you encounter feel more like murderous gangsters, making the complex moral choices the game mostly succeeds at fail miserably the moment you have to choose whose side you’re on. In one particularly egregious mission, you’re asked whether or not you want to rescue a man who’s showing visible signs of torture, or leave him for his torturers to find. It’s almost too blunt the way it goes about it, eschewing the push and pull and immersion in the daytime segments for a choice that’s almost always “wanna be complicit in a murder, or no?”
It’s frustrating, where you get into a rhythm of checking cars and a more subtle, complex kind of morality only to be thrown out of it the moment you get into the mission segments and are given the choice to help or harm the people you spend the majority of the game mowing down by the barrelful.
Then there’s the driving. A part of the game you get to (thankfully) bypass in its more routine segments, Contraband Police’s driving is similar to controlling a 3D-rendered soapbox derby racer with greased wheels. You bounce and fishtail over the ground, sometimes missing turns or failing to come to a complete stop. More often than not, your front end will find a tree like there’s a magnet attached to it. Pursuit missions quickly turn into a downhill race where the object is to crash into each other as fast as possible. Fishtailing isn’t so much an inconvenience as a fact of life. Repairing becomes compulsory, as does the fifty dollar maintenance fee you get charged every time you come back to the border post.
It makes for a good but incredibly jarring experience. On one hand, an immersive experience of working at a border checkpoint and wishing for anything to break up the monotony. On the other, a janky FPS about being a cop caught up in a fight against mobsters and terrorists who control the territory around your small border outpost. For everything it does right, a thing it does kind of wrong. For every moment of immersion, a moment where it breaks, either technically or in terms of gameplay.
As a whole, it’s fantastic, a game you can appreciate in spite of its flaws and rough spots. While it certainly takes some getting used to, it’s an experience like no other, and one worth playing to its conclusion. Not quite Papers, Please, not quite Police Simulator, but something weirdly in the worlds of both.
The Good
- Immersive border patrol simulator
- Excellent pacing
- Lethal enemy AI
The Bad
- Awful vehicle handling
- Uneven division of story and immersive gameplay
- Buggy shooting and driving
Final Score: