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For a limited time you can get Full Throttle Remastered from GOG HERE and a Steam key for Lego: The Hobbit from the Humble Bundle site HERE

Police Patrol

In Brief

A budget racing and police chase game, that I'd score a 1 out of 10 ''and that's being generous''. This has to be the biggest disappointment I've had from a game given away by this site since its inception back in 2006. Sorry, I cannot in all honesty say anything positive about this game after seeing the extent of it's extremely limited game play. You can complete whats on offer in less than 2 minutes once you've got used to the over sensitive controls. What you see on the videos below is exactly whats on offer, no more......

Installation:

Police Patrol downloads to a 40.4 MB zip file that unzips to three files, (a setup.gcd security wrapper, the set-up file and a read me). If you have multiple hard drives you can save games on any drive you wish by replacing the C drive letter in the path with whatever drive letter you wish the game to be installed to. The newly installed game is 135 MB in size. The game installs to the following path by default:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Police Patrol

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However, if you prefer a different path for installation for example I use G:\Games\ name of game instead of 'C:\Program Files (x86)\MyPlayCity\name of game'. You can edit the default path when the Setup - Police Patrol - Select Destination Location window appears.

Five shortcuts are installed to the desktop, four of which can be safely deleted (i.e. Falco Space - Online Game!, FalconLine Online Games Website, FalcoGo WebGL Games! and Free Games Downloads!). If you don't want to install the games shortcut to the desktop during installation, just make sure the install desktop shortcut is unchecked when the 'additional task's window appears; you will still get two of the other Falcoware shortcuts installed (i.e. FalconLine Online Games Website & FalcoGo WebGL Games shortcuts). Also, if you don't like icons installed to the quick launch task bar, make sure you also uncheck the appropriate checkbox when the 'additional task's window appears (after the Select Start Menu Folder window).

Introduction:

In Police Patrol your mission is to catch the bad guys who are trying to get away. You must catch up to and stop the criminal within a specific time and before they reach their destinations or you fail and have to start again.

The Game:

I had high hopes for this game when I first checked out screen captures and the video before I received a copy as there appeared to be a large open world, with a massive network of roads to explore. On it were four red dots. Well, I finally got the game installed and jumped in. My initial thoughts were ''okay'', the graphics are a little retro-cartoony and the missions are initially quick (30 seconds or less) and easy, despite the sensitivity of the controls being a little too much, but once you get used to that, catching the thief in your car chase it was very easy. Each mission is timed. If you don't catch the car within a specific time which is literally around 30 seconds at the most, you fail and have to restart that mission. Within minutes it became obvious that the four red dots on the map I'd seen and which presents itself when you start a new game are the four missions this game offers. That's it. Four simple missions that take less than 30 seconds each to complete. The game doesn't stop when you complete those missions, it just circles around to the first mission and repeats itself ad nauseam. With respect to the achievements and awards button on the map. That is greyed out and appears not to be active. whether the developer intends to expand on the game I haven't any information to say yes or no. I'm hoping that the developer will consider opening up the whole map and include more missions. I noticed a couple of NPC characters on one of the screen captures. I didn't see any NPC's at all. I played the game for about 20 minutes seeing if something changed, but all I did was play the same four short missions over and over, then I closed the game in disgust.

It seems to me this is an unfinished game, with the potential to be a much better game if the whole map was opened up. Someone in the Steam community called it shovel ware, as the publisher appears to be the indie bundle maker Otakumaker, who release several bundles on a regular basis, filled with similar titles, half completed games, that appear to be giving you a massive discount in games with 90% plus discounts on the actual price. I used to buy loads of indie bundles. When the Humble Bundle started the trend back in 2012 the games that were included were genuine indie games that had a lot of work put into them, titles like The World of Goo, Gish, and even AAA games like Battlefield 3 and Operation Flashpoint Red River. The advent of the cheap game engines, many of which are now available via Steam have seen a massive influx of amateur developers releasing such titles that are now added to most of the bundles being released, (most of which are nothing more than fading shadows of the original indie bundle concept, and not worth the time of day). At any one time you'll find at least 50 different bundles, all offering massive discounts on the games they contain. Of all those I think only a couple such as the Humble Bundle and Indie Gala are still genuinely giving decent discounts on decent games, the rest are as that Steam member put it Shovel ware. I'm truly very disappointed in this game and have already deleted it from my system. It's not even worth the title of a demo, at least with those you get an hours worth of decent game play.

Controls:

W or Up - Accelerate
S or Down - Brake
A or Left - Turn the Car left
D or Right - Turn the Car right

Features:

Other Reviews and Videos of Police Patrol:

You can see Steam community comments of Police Patrol HERE Most of the comments are negative, but if you look at the amount of time most of those who gave it a thumbs down played the game it was for 0.1hrs , that's 6minutes or less. You can see an in-game video of game play HERE,

If you miss today's game giveaway you can always get the game via Steam for £0.99 HERE; or the second in the series for free from Falcoware HERE. If you go for version 2, it does have some unwelcome requests(access to accounts etc) in the EULA, but ignore those and click on no, and you still get the game download. I've downloaded a couple of their games from their web site and none of them have any adware or other malware included and on closing the game, there's no browser redirection.

Problems getting the game to work:

If you're having problems installing or activating or getting Police Patrol to work please visit the FAQ's Thread HERE and read through the communities comments because sometimes fixes have already been posted, for example, a common issue seen since the Themida wrapper was introduced three years ago is that some community members installation of the game are blocked by their security because Themida code has been known to hide malware, (usually an error message is flagged for example 'The executable is corrupted' even though in reality it is not); so as a precaution some anti malware programs will block and even delete the suspect installation files even though the files (i.e. the setup, read me and setup.gcd files are actually totally free from malware. This issue can be solved either by rebooting your computer in safe mode with networking or a quicker method is to temporarily turn off your security software to allow the installation. You could also try white-listing the setup.gcd file. In the almost 12 years this game giveaway site has been operating there has 'never' been a game given away that was infected with malware.