Rebel Cops

Having never played This Is The Police 1 or 2, I will focus on the turn-based tactics perspective of the game.
The common TBT game elements:
2 action points per character, which can be used for movement or action. Picking up items does not cost action points.
A cover system: full cover, half cover, and no cover. The cover system affects the hit chance when using firearms.
Distance to an enemy affects the hit accuracy.
Inventory management: You can buy various items from the shop. The items you buy can potentially make maps easier (such as lockpicks, tasers, flashbangs, body armor, and helmets), especially for some bosses. I played one mission carrying only batons and got all my cops captured by a mob boss…
How this game differs from other TBT games:
No hit points: There is no health bar. One shot, one kill.
Skill management: All cops have the same skill tree. You can level up your cops by completing side missions and main mission objectives, arresting, injuring, or killing criminals on each map, and delivering high-value items back to extraction points. The skill you get for each level up is random but also related to the actions you chose for your cop in each mission. If you don’t use up both action points for some turns, you might get a skill related to it. If you manage to arrest a criminal without knocking him out first, you might get a skill to enhance your ability to arrest criminals.. But all cops will have the same skills when they reach level 10.
Rebel Point System: You can get rebel points for certain actions. The points can later be redeemed to make the mission much easier or get you out of a tricky situation.
Street Cred: Affects store item prices. When you reach -10 street cred, cops on your team will leave you.
The good:
Linear storyline, but it is amazing. I did not see the ending coming…
The scores for the game are the best. Love the combination of piano, bass, viola, saxophone, and drums. Very fitting for each mission.
Permanent death: As the game said, one single shot can cost a cop their life.
Stealth: You can complete the missions in any way you like (except the loud missions), but I like that the game prefers you to complete as many missions as possible in stealth. You are leading a ragtag squad of cops, and your resources should be limited. Going guns blazing will drain your ammo inventory really fast. Stealth forces you to be careful not to rush and check every corner because you never know who might be patrolling on the other side of a corner.
The mix:
Some missions can be really long, one in particular very early. One mission took me 5 hrs and 12 mins to complete, but that is because I wanted to complete all objectives and find all the items on the map. I nearly got discouraged by the size of the map and worried all the rest of the missions would take that long. However, that mission is the only one that takes that long. Don’t let that discourage you from completing the game. I do hope the developer can put the large map mission toward the end of the storyline.
The bad:
Cannot rotate the camera angle. Sometimes, I wish to rotate the camera angle to see where my cops can go. Nothing critical, I only encountered this probably twice for my playthrough.
A few bugs on random actions the cops can take, such as grabbing a corpse or arresting heavy armored mob. It happened twice in my 27 hrs of gameplay. It can be annoying, especially if you only use the limited save. Potential means you might need to reload a previous save.
Overall, Rebel Cops is a solid turn-based tactics game. I quite enjoy stealthing most of the missions. Feels accomplished after arresting all the criminals in maps without any casualties.

It's a lot of fun! ...BUT.

That's this game in a nutshell. It's one of those games that makes me wish Steam had a more nuanced rating system than it does. The core gameplay is really gripping and there were some moments where I was so immersed that I was about ready to call this one of my new favorite turn-based strategy games. That said, it has some serious issues that hold it back from true greatness.

Rebel Cops is a sequel/spin-off to Weappy's This Is The Police franchise, specifically the second game. It takes the big new addition introduced in that game and refines it to be the entirety of the experience: grid-based turn-based strategy, but with added stealth and arresting mechanics to help spice it up.

This is a strictly gameplay-centered experience, as there's essentially no story to speak of. The set-up is that you control a small handful of cops who decide to rebel against the reigning criminal empire run by Victor Zuev. And that's it. The game doesn't really grow or develop past this initial premise, and the only cutscene you get is at the very end of the game. Text is hardly if ever spoken, and there's no on central protagonist to tie the whole thing together. The story exists to get you from mission to mission and nothing else and the ending is simply unsatisfying. If the appeal of the This Is The Police games for you was the story, then you're out of luck with this game.

With gameplay taking center-stage, as much fun as the moment-to-moment is, two major things keep this game from being truly stellar: massive fucking maps and poorly conveyed mechanics and set-pieces.

Depending on the mission, you will be tasked with exploring gigantic maps that can and likely will last you a few DOZEN turns, and it can start to drag out the experience considerably. The game's second proper mission is huge, with several buildings and landmarks (not to mention a shit ton of guards) to consider. A later mission at a supermarket took me at least 60 turns to complete, and no, I am not exaggerating.

But that would be more tolerable if it wasn't for the game throwing you a few too many curveballs that serve to make playing the game more frustrating than fun. Without even telling you, sometimes the game will just straight up include certain ideas that only serve to catch you off-guard. For example, one mission has one of your officers hold a security guard at gunpoint to ensure he does not radio his buddies and make sure you are there sneaking around. What the game DOESN'T tell you is that this only lasts so many turns before the guy rats you out, leading to all the enemies becoming aware of you and a firefight breaking out.

So if you had an idea for a stealth run that mission, good fucking luck. Needless to say, I was not a fan of this trick the game pulled on me, especially since it heavily encourages a more deliberate, methodical, sneakier way of play. Killing guards is one thing, but you rewarded more XP to your units for having them make arrests instead, which not only requires you to sneak up to them and get them to freeze, but arresting them also erases them from the board, whereas killing them leaves their dead bodies to be discovered by other patrolling enemies. Seems contradictory to the game's general design philosophy.

Ultimately, as fun as the core mechanics are, the huge maps and cheap surprises will more-than-likely hamper the experience. If you know these things going in and still wanna give it a shot, then by all means. I can't claim to have hated this game.

Fun XCOM-like strategy game while simultaneously incredibly frustrating.
Yet another game that makes me wish Steam had a 'mixed' rating.

Good turn based strategy game, take This is the Police 2 mechanics and improves on them, short story but levels can take a long time to go through depending on your play style, I spent 3 hours alone on completing one map.

The story was very classic, engaging for the style of play. Great mechanics, but missions can get long. Fun playthrough!

It's simpler than Firaxis' XCOM games, but still fun nonetheless.

In short, you go into missions with a group of up to 6 cops from a rebel militia striking against a crime family. You start out broke and amass funds by helping the local populace with favors. And you have the option to kill everyone on sight, with guns or knives, or to arrest them, taking them alive.
There's a taser gun on a cooldown and a baton for taking suspects alive. For killing, it offers you knives, revolvers and pistols, as well as shotguns and hunting rifles. That's all, the game has 4 different guns and a campaign with (no spoilers) 10 main missions, 2 optional missions and 2 of the main missions have an A and B path, to offer a bit of a different experience on a 2nd playtrough.

My issues with the game: there are only 2 zoom levels, close and far, with no rotation of the camera. It's a fixed angle. The map and artwork look pretty. But if you wish you could zoom in to look at things closer, sorry, you can't. I actually didn't have problems missing interactible objects since they get highlighted for visibility. But it's VERY easy to misclick and move one of your cops where you didn't want them to.
Besides that, the game is harder at the beginning, but the difficulty goes downhill if you're moderately competent at managing resources and manpower. But the last 4 to 3 missions do increase difficulty.

And, ending on a positive note, I did like that each mission has an unknown factor that comes in to force you to adapt and react to situations on the fly. It helps to keep the experience engaging and avoids repetition.

It's a nice short game but tough, but having played both This is the Police and This is the Police II it was fun to try a different playstyle. They don't joke around when they say you have limited resources. Inventory management was also fun and frustrating. There's a lot of things that you can't go back on which they don't really tell you, so I guess that is my only complaint.