Police Mission Chief Review

The Good, The Bad, and The Boring

Do you long for the rush of being your hometown’s only saving grace? Do you yearn to protect and serve in the comfort of your own home? Then Police Mission Chief might be the game for you. Developed by SHPlay GmbH, this simulator puts players in charge of their own emergency response team. At first, this game seems promising, but later proves to be a typical idle grind dressed up as a simulator.

The meat and potatoes of the game happens in the dispatch center, sending different units to their appropriate missions to earn a few credits: police cars to home break-ins, fire-engines to burning buildings and much more. If you want to progress in the game, you’ll need to create an account. After creating an account, you can join alliances with other players to receive more missions and earn some more credits. Longtime fans of their games will be pleased to know that you can log into Police Mission Chief with their current account.

Copy Paste, Basics

Police Mission Chief gives players the tools they need to personalize their in-game experience. Players can use their hometowns for the in-game map by turning on location services, giving every mission a familiar touch. You can choose the location for any building and name it whatever you want. There are community made graphic packs to represent your vehicles on the map. Each mission uses real-life addresses from the area surrounding your home-base.

This is the fourth app by game developer SHPlay GmbH and they certainly have a wheelhouse. Each of their games has been a re-hash of the last: Mission Chief, Meldkamerspel, and MissionChief-911 are all the same. Rather than just update past installments, the developers release a completely new app identical to the last. The only major difference between Police Mission Chief and its predecessor MissionChief-911 is a change in color from red to blue.

Gotta Spend Money to Make Money

Unfortunately, this game has an issue with monetization. There are two types of currency in Police Mission Chief, credits, and coins. Credits are earned through dispatch missions and coins can be bought with real money. Coins are worth much more in the game. A building may cost anywhere from fifty thousand to five hundred thousand credits, but carries a lighter cost of ten to fifty coins. This becomes an issue when most missions only give you a couple hundred credits. The time it takes to dispatch units is grossly disproportionate to the amount of money earned in-game and there is no offline earning system. Not to mention, you need to earn a certain amount of credits for promotions, which unlocks new buildings and vehicles, ranging from ten thousand all the way up to five million.

Police Mission Chief suffers from a lack of visual stimulation. Most of the title is a mass of text and lack luster loading bars. The map attempts to remedy this with downloadable clip art and a satellite view option, but ultimately fails. The satellite option removes all town and street names only to replace them with a green, topographical mess. Most of the game takes place in the dispatch screen and if you choose not to join an alliance, there are only a few missions to choose from, leaving the bulk of the page blank. In addition to simplistic design, the gameplay isn’t as complex as one would think either. Apart from buying buildings and vehicles, hiring employees and dispatching units, there isn’t much else to do.

Could Be Worse

There is clearly something to this formula, over one million people have downloaded the previous game, Mission Chief and SHPlay GmbH keep adding new, interesting updates, but Police Mission Chief is not only poorly monetized but is underdeveloped at this juncture. Granted, it has only been a month since its release and has plenty of time to grow. If your looking for a casual simulation game that quenches your thirst for law and order, Police Mission Chief may do the trick for a while, but it misses the mark in grabbing your attention.