Highway Police Simulator

Written by Jason Dailey on 12/9/2024 for PS5  

After scoffing at the simulator genre for most of my gaming career, I’ve grown to love them as an adult, even becoming a bit of a champion for the genre. There’s something about a simulator’s deep dive into a particular vocation or technical skill that scratches a role-playing itch for me. I’ve come to appreciate the genre so much, in fact, that I can typically look past what I endearingly refer to as “simulator jank”. You know exactly what I’m talking about – those bugs that cause NPC heads to spin around like The Exorcist, or equipment that doesn’t quite work like it’s supposed to. I can deal with some of that, but there comes a point where enough is enough, and a game goes from buggy to broken. Such is the case with Highway Police Simulator – a simulator with big ideas and even bigger performance problems.

At the start, the game lets you create a custom officer in its rather basic character creator, though you can’t change your last name because all the game’s dialogue is written for “Officer Marshall”. That’s right – Highway Police Simulator has dialogue and a narrative, which is not something you see every day in the world of simulators. You can choose from two character backgrounds – police family or street kid – which inform how NPCs react to you, though I didn’t get far enough to actually see how, or if, this actually affects anything.

As I was progressing through the first few story missions, I hit a game-breaking bug that required me to purchase an unmarked police vehicle to continue, which wouldn’t be a problem if I had enough skill points to unlock one, or better yet, if I had a way to earn the necessary points to unlock one. Thinking I had surely missed something, I scoured the in-game map looking for an objective icon to no avail. Then, I thought if I patrolled a bit and completed some traffic stops that I would gain the necessary skill point, but it didn’t appear that I had progressed far enough for that feature to become available either. And when I tried to pull someone over regardless, attempting to force progression, the driver of the vehicle disappeared after stopping. All of which is to say that this game is unplayable in its current state.

Even beyond its shear unplayable state, Highway Police Simulator has more bugs than a melted popsicle on a summer sidewalk. Lag spikes occur every 60 seconds or so, some traffic lights never change, and NPC vehicles ramp in the air so often that I thought I was playing one of those old stuntman games, just to name a few. Again, the sheer amount and frequency of bugs and graphical glitches moves beyond the standard simulator jank and into the realm of being egregious. This is a game that desperately needs optimization, and frankly, I’m shocked it was released in its current state, when surely it will play better in a month or two. In fact, the developers already have an update roadmap lined out, with the first major update expected around December 15^th, and the second around January 23^rd, according to the game’s Steam page. Those updates can’t come a moment too soon, that’s for sure.

Looks like Zac Mercer is a member of Hair Club for Men.

With that said, I must give praise to the story elements of Highway Police Simulator, which is a relatively big swing for the genre. Though every cutscene is extremely corny, and of course, buggy (every line of dialogue is prematurely cut off), I appreciated them for trying to inject personality into the genre, and more so for attempting to bring something new to the table. The characters are super uncanny valley in physical appearance, and their actions are so strange that it brings humor to the game, which works surprisingly well despite the serious nature of simulators.

During the opening scene of the game, your cruiser flips over and crashes after a group of inmates are busted out of a prison bus. I walked over to talk with my partner immediately after the incident, to which she replied, “What a beautiful morning!”. She was unintentionally hilarious at that moment, but later, she told me a story about her cousin who shot at a UFO in his underwear while intoxicated. It’s a strangely humorous tone for a simulator, to be sure, but for me it worked in the brief amount of time I was able to spend with it.

As a critic, I hate sitting down to write a scathing review of a game, but at the end of the day, I didn’t make the game the way it is. I don’t think the developers set out to make a broken game, or even a buggy game, but the truth is that Highway Police Simulator is both of those things currently, to the point where I could barely progress in the campaign. In addition, it is missing some basic policing elements, such as flashlights and tasers, which are planned to be introduced in future updates, and is even more evidence that this game is unfinished. Oddly enough, I feel that Highway Police Simulator has quite a bit of potential. It’s one of the better-looking simulators on the market, and has an interesting story element, so if they can clean it up to a far more stable condition, there may be something here. But as things stand, it should be avoided until further notice.