Autobahn Police Simulator 2 Review

You’ve arrived at the precinct, it’s the chief commissioners last shift before he retires after a fulfilled career on the force. Everybody’s there, your colleagues, your partner, even the chief’s family. But for this special event, you’ve decided to drop two tabs of acid. You begin to enter a world of fever dreams as faces melt all around you. Everyone talking looks to be screaming without screaming, their faces turn into shrivelled raisins every other sentence, faces creep closer to your own face despite being meters away, they won’t stop vibrating.

That’s what the game mostly consists of, clunky, broken visuals held together by thin police tape.

From the get-go, your third-person camera does not want to co-operate and will actively throw you off direction if it gets too close to any surface. Doors can potentially trap you forever depending on which direction you decide to open them in. Character Models with their arms swinging like an angry orangutan as they run down corridors.

It’s the polar opposite of a badass police simulator, it’s a traffic police simulator. It can send a conversation from “dude can I go on a patrol with you” to “if I catch you behind the lens of a speed camera, I’ll break your face”

You’re tasked to complete all sorts of motorway related jobs. From tailing cars and recording their speed to interviewing crash victims, you’re doing everything you could imagine a traffic cop would do. Although there may be more satisfaction in the day to day interactions of a traffic warden than there is in Autobahn Police Simulator 2.

It starts with the User Interface in which pausing the menu and opening your map can take up to 6 seconds at a time, and in a game where the map is your best friend. However, said key map isn’t used for adventurous reasons like catching criminals efficiently. No, no, it’s key because you can’t get away with a U-turn going the other direction without getting your wide, off-brand, police car stuck. If your objective is looking at you from across the road good luck.

The bollards in the middle of the road mean you have to find the nearest interchange 5 minutes down the road in order to get on the other side. MEANING if you forget to use that map you might just be driving 5 minutes down the road only to be going the wrong way. It shows how the design choice of the constant bollards means that you could be spending up to 30 minutes driving the opposite direction until you’ve discovered all the fast travel points which takes just as painstakingly long, t i r i n g.

DESPITE all is, there is lots of humour to be had playing Autobahn Police Simulator 2. All these weird and frustrating quirks do give the game its charm. This is the case with most simulator games. When booting it up, I laughed out loud looking at the movements of their mouths running all over the screen as NPC’s talk. And that’s it, these games are the streamers choice for a reason, lots of fun to be had jesting and giggling away at the awfulness of it all. At the same time, it also appeals to those who are die-hard traffic cops, those learning the trade, or those interested in what the job entails.

I’ve seen the success of Farming Simulator while painting a local farmhouse’s fence one summer. One of the kids there was telling me the entire ins and outs of every tractor and field while all I could think about was how my friends and I were just doing our best to break the game by stacking tractors on top of each other. But the beauty was the game allowed enough freedom to do what you want and learn while you play. It also had the benefit of multiplayer so you can grab some friends and laugh away at the funny looking farmers all the while appealing to wannabe farmers by offering a genuine and sophisticated simulator. Both stupid and valuable.

Simulators like Autobahn have a long way to go. If it reaches the level of farming simulator 20, I have no doubt it could be a 10/10 play. But as it stands, it needs a lot of ironing out to make the game smoother and accessible. As an inspiring traffic cop, 6/10. As a lazy student who likes videos of monkeys and the odd game of Yakuza, 3/10.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Playstation 4 code was provided to Bonus Stage for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to press@4gn.co.uk.