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:

Moonshine Inc Review

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Moonshine, Inc.
Developer: Klabater
Publisher: Klabater
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Xbox Series X and Series S
MSRP: 19.99

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It’s not often a game is a strong argument in favor of early access.

Since I first played Moonshine, Inc. in what could be considered a “rough draft” phase, it’s made leaps and bounds in getting closer to a released state. But the operative word there is closer. While playable and a lot more accessible in its current state, it is still very rough, with bugs and quality of life issues that are still somewhat frustrating. It’s a game with good ideas, but one that needed a little more time to cook than it got, resulting in some solid concepts and a sloppy enough execution that perhaps they should spend some time working out the kinks that make it less than worth the time and money.

Moonshine, Inc casts you as the unnamed grand-nephew of a moonshiner. After getting heavily in debt to the mob in “the big city,” you go back to Appalachia and take over the family still, ready to run illegal liquor to every secluded hideout in the forested mountains and learn to make a variety of recipes to get the local hillfolk utterly blasted. As you research methods, recipes, and equipment, you grow your moonshine empire and expand through multiple levels, reconnecting with your great uncle and sister as all three of you try to strike it rich.

Moonshine, Inc. is a brewing sim, similar in some ways to games like Terroir or Hundred Days with its fine-tuning and management over each step. You figure out recipes through trial and error, balance that against your missions and the demands of your eccentric clients, and use the money you get for upgraded equipment and facilities to make better liquor, all while dodging the police. It’s a premise with a lot of potential, one that has you trying to supply based on demand while your ingredients are watched by the cops, and encouraging you to experiment with various flavors and recipes to unlock further varieties on the “recipe map,” a large web of recipes where each recipe completed successfully opens up more hints, allowing you to plan out what you want to experiment with and balance based on the progress you already have.

The ideas behind the brewing process are at least intuitive. If you want to experiment with a wide variety of processes, you can. If you want to keep things as simple as possible and mess around with the flavor profile and then dump as much ethanol as possible into the end result, well, you can do that too. It’s accessible in a way you don’t usually get, with sims falling to either one side or the other— either easy enough you don’t have to think about it, or complex enough that you get lost in the weeds and never manage to create something high quality. After some upgrades and experimentation with the format, the player’s able to knock it out of the park, and fine-tune things as they go based on the problems they themselves find. It’s a great feeling once you finally unlock that understanding, and the best part of the game.

Unfortunately, the parts around it are nowhere near as balanced. The store, for example, has you buy bulk ingredients and avoid ingredients that might be watched for “police pressure,” but the police pressure bar went up regardless of whether I bought anything. Similarly, the selling mechanics are a little lacking in options— there are random events, but they occur rather infrequently and only on specific routes. You also don’t get to set a route when you make a delivery, the driver will just take a preset route to a place, no shortcuts or cop avoidance available (at least from what I saw). For a game about moonshining, the thing that birthed a major driving subculture and gave birth to things like auto racing, it felt frustratingly simple where it should be more complex.

Similarly, the plot tends to be more of an excuse than anything else, with only a vague suggestion of a story. For a game that gates its content from chapter to chapter, the narrative should actually be more than a vague skeleton. A proper narrative in a simulation game can work wonders— just look at recent hard-SF citybuilder Ixion, for example— for a plot that has you constantly solving problems and gaining better tech as the story requires it, but in Moonshine, Inc you’re hard-pressed to discover the story or why it’s happening. At most, you get a bunch of text boxes with your great-uncle and sister talking, and then eventually you move on to the next “area” with absolutely no real variety at all. It might as well be a sandbox mode.

This weird gating even extends to the tutorial. There’s a very “stop and go” kind of feel to it, where you’re only allowed to do what it asks of you, but the game stops you from even doing that properly, with sliders always stopping just shy of the number you’re instructed to use, and it all combines to feel more like it’s holding you back as opposed to guiding you, making sure that you stay on the path and follow it exactly.

Which all begs the question: When do you get to play the game?

Sure, you can make an astonishing number of recipes, but every time you try to break out on your own or discover something for yourself, the game complains that you haven’t used one of the existing recipes. If you try to figure out your own flavor profile, the game starts pushing you towards one of the existing recipes it has. You can research and unlock a robust number of techniques and equipment to use, but do only a limited amount with them, as the game keeps you from researching tech or unlocking recipes too fast by gating more advanced techniques behind later chapters. The “chapter” structure itself doesn’t do much more than keep you locked off from further content, teasing future discoveries but only after you finish a to-do list, lose all your equipment, and set up a new still in a different location. It leads to you running out of things to do or goals to achieve save for that arbitrary to-do list very quickly, with you unlocking all the resources and recipes you need very early in a chapter and then essentially killing time by completing your story tasks.

This ties into a larger issue: The gameplay feels incredibly arbitrary. Sure, you get a great opening sequence with voice acting and a setup of the premise, but once you get into the game, it’s just watching the same three guys run around your backwoods hideaway moving crates from one place to another, and occasionally setting up a delivery to one of three locations. When you run low on ingredients, you go to the store and rack up a bill. Most of what you do is wait: Wait for the distillation to move on to the next phase so you can fine-tune your batch from one of the robust menus, wait for the police to catch wise to you (which they don’t, usually), wait for the deliveries to complete, wait until the game acknowledges you completed its objectives, or wait for something to advance. It’s just not that interesting to wait. There aren’t a lot of issues that will come up, the game is almost insultingly easy, and even watching your little criminal enterprise work isn’t worth it. Things eventually just turn into you watching progress bars and occasionally checking something else going on. I found myself running it in another window and checking back when my tasks were completed. When I did that, nothing about the experience fundamentally changed.

All of this makes the rougher elements feel a lot worse than they actually are. If all your time is spent in menus, then UI elements being broken (like on the fermentation screen, where sometimes the graphs end up halfway up your screen) or completely vanishing (like on the distillation and bottling screens) make no sense. If the story objectives feel arbitrary, then it makes it look all the worse when the story is barely unconnected text box conversations. If your content is gated behind specific chapters, then the chapters meaning nothing is frustrating, something made even more so by the lack of any indication of progress in the story tasks. No progress bars, not even a simple counter to show how close you are to the goal. If you’re spending most of your time micromanaging distillation and occasionally placing equipment, then getting soft-locked in menus makes you want to engage with the main part of the game that much less enjoyable. If you have to spend time micromanaging at all, then the game not pausing when you’re on the map or looking through menus just seems frustrating. When it feels like there’s very little point to playing the game, then you begin to wonder why the developers even bothered.

Which brings us back to the top of the review.

If Moonshine, Inc was in early access, all of this could be forgiven. It would acknowledge the game wasn’t finished, but that there was a dedication to polishing it up. It would show more of an effort being made. At the time of this review, the game’s been patched to 1.02 and still feels like it’s a playable beta.

It’s a game centered around one excellent idea. It would be lovely if there were more than that one.

The Good:
- Robust distilling modes and a variety of interesting recipes to unlock and tinker with
- Nice soundtrack
- Decent art

The Bad:
- Uninteresting gameplay loop
- Severe balance issues (Wildly easy in some places, mildly obtuse in others, arbitrary gating across the game)
- Unfinished-feeling gameplay and visuals

Final Score:

Maybe I’ll play the finished version and revise my score someday. But until then, if this is all I get, then this is all they get.

Sweet Transit - An Early Access Review

Platform: PC
Developer: Ernestas Norvaišas
Publisher: Team17
Release Date: Early Access as of July 28, 2022

Sweet Transit, a new rail simulator/citybuilder currently in early access, is a deceptively frustrating game.

From the start, it presents itself as something of a pleasant, relaxing, folksy builder game. There’s a bluesy americana soundtrack by Ely Robbins, a Western-style aesthetic with its laborers and “beginning of the rail era” atmosphere, and the idea of building trains to connect cities and unlock further buildings and advancements is kind of a cool one. You’re set loose on a gorgeous map to build your first centers of industry, and from there, to slowly conquer the New World by connecting it up with trains.

It’s at the point somewhere around building your first train that you find yourself somewhat in error, and this was the point that I began to have flashbacks to when I used to try programming in Python. Sweet Transit is, you see, a systems-based game, in the sense that you have to work out logistics, gates, and kind of puzzle out where the bugs are in your transit system. Some of this is covered by the tutorials. Some of it remains obtuse, always just tantalizingly out of reach. It’s a game with a rather steep learning curve, and one that remains sweetly deceptive even as you bash your head against yet another logistics problem for the fourth time. It’s satisfying, brain-melting, and somehow intriguing in one bizarre package.

Sweet Transit begins with you procedurally generating a map. From there, you place your first warehouse, first village center, and your first industries before finally connecting it all up with railways. As you fulfill more objectives, you slowly open up more options— successfully building a coal plant means you get access to your first train, because you now have a source of fuel, bringing enough people to your village means you open up a market— and connecting the world through a network of rails and signal gates. As nothing moves without a rail network, it places the emphasis on building trains, routes, learning how to set up if/then statements to get your trains to move along those routes, and building signals to control the flow of rail traffic.

So right off the bat, the game is gorgeous. The areas are lush, the colors are vibrant, and even the deserts look like they’re alive. The trains are usually brightly colored in a way that makes the player feel nostalgic for old-style locomotive engines. Between the graphical style and instrumentals, it evokes feelings of the older Sid Meier series Railroad Tycoon, which ran on a similar premise of connecting supply centers with trains in a huge logistical network. With the bluesy Americana of the soundtrack, it makes everything feel of a piece. It’s an excellent presentation.

It’s also satisfying to watch things work, to slowly build up your villages and watch them bustle around as you slowly build the town, then the first industry (usually a fishing dock) and then move on to mines and your first train line. Buildings are grouped by use, you can simply click on any part of the environment, and it’ll bring up a menu about the thing you clicked, with the list of building options and extensions right there. It’s very easy in those first few moments to get a jump-start on building. Then you fall off the difficulty cliff, and the game decides to show you what it’s really like.

Building railroads is…complex. It’s also very easy to get stuck with something that doesn’t work, requiring you to plot things out in advance. While the game does come with an extensive tutorial that shows you how to build and chain together signal blocks, set up the basic if/then statements for your train routes, and connect your first villages, it is also very obtuse. This is not a game for those who are just getting into strategy of this type, it’s essentially a ‘90s sim builder game given modern graphics and a mildly easier to understand interface. Even with the tutorials, it’s got a steeper learning curve, requiring you to really know what you’re doing before you lay those first tracks. But the good news is, after the first few tries, suddenly it starts to hum along, and you’re juggling routes, finding more efficient ways to lay rail, and it all starts to come together.

But to get to that point, there’s a lot of trial and error. While the tutorials do give some guidance, and there are help messages, they seem a little obtuse at times. It took me three tries to get my first functioning railroad, with at least one complete restart. When I finally did get things running, it took me a while to experiment with signals until the trains I had would actually move on the tracks, and in one case, a train I sent to load up supplies would just…pass the station completely rather than loading, for reasons still unclear even with the (somewhat overzealous) message system pointing out any errors in logistics. This is after going through the tutorials. Similarly, a bug in the logistics can stall everything, frustrating the player and requiring them to check exactly what happened.

Furthermore, if you botch a building placement, there’s no real way to move it or correct that mistake once it’s down without deleting everything attached to it and moving it to the correct place. This can get annoying, especially with train routes, since then the trains now have specific instructions they cannot carry out and things will have to be re-added to the route. Further frustrating the placement issues are some bizarre pathing errors when laying train tracks, where trying to construct a simple curve will result in esoteric, looping patterns unless you use the “precise movement” option to build tracks incrementally. It’s kind of an unforgiving system, even as it does so many things right.

All of this could actually be fixed with a more integrated tutorial. The tutorial section is very well done and informative, though as it’s not actually connected to starting up a game, it becomes an exercise where one can get very good at learning the tutorials, but a little fuzzier on applying that knowledge. If there was some way to take you through the early steps of the game, it would do a lot for newer players, allowing them to get a grip on systems in a more practical and applied way. It’s a game with some great ideas and some interesting systems that actually has a kind of coding aspect to it, setting up if/then statements and building with more complexity from there.

But for right now, if you’re a hardcore simulation fan, then this will be a definite delight, a pleasing and cozy-looking game with a lot of interlocking systems that require prior planning and full knowledge of how things work to get everything moving just right. It’s the perfect game for those who know what they’re doing.

It could, however, use a little more polish if you’re still new to the genre.

The Good:
- Easy and intuitive interface
- Lush, pleasant visual style
- Deep and complex logistical mechanics
- Excellent map variety
- A relaxing game with just enough challenge for hardcore building sim fans

The Bad:
- Huge difficulty curve for newcomers
- Frustrating pathing for a game entirely about building transit paths
- Making a wrong move can sometimes erase tons of work.
- Tutorials separate from the main game cause difficulty applying the knowledge to in-game scenarios

In its current early access state, it’s a delight for hardcore sim fans and a nightmare to those just getting into things.