Autobahn Police Simulator 3 | Xbox Review

When I think of games with the word “simulator” in their title, I tend to assume they’re usually of good quality, with highly detailed experiences. Titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator or Euro Truck Simulator immediately come to mind. The same can be said for “tycoon” games. Rollercoaster Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon are two great examples of the genre. However, like any genre, it has its fair share of stinkers that scrape the bottom of the barrel, like Surgeon Simulator or Donald Trump’s Real Estate Tycoon…yes, that’s a thing. Developed and published by Aerosoft, Autobahn Police Simulator 3, I’m sad to say, falls in the latter category.

Life Is A Highway

Autobahn Police Simulator 3 is an open-world title that’s surprisingly narrative-driven with full voice acting; quite uncommon for the genre. You step into the shoes of a traffic cop in the autobahnpolizei, which roughly translates to freeway police. After choosing your character from a small selection of pre-made models, the game starts on your first day back on the force after suffering an injury sustained in the line of duty while chasing a gang of street racers. As this is an open-world game, it’s structured as such, with story missions and side missions along with random encounters and activities sprinkled in.

The setting takes place primarily in the German countryside, with a small smattering of towns and rest stops, all tied together with a small network of freeways. While the playable world might seem large at first, there’s hardly any explorable space since much of the world is blocked off by invisible walls. Even when driving through backroads in open areas, there were unseen barriers less than 3 feet away from the side of the road.

Detail Oriented

I will say, just like any game bearing the “simulator” moniker, the experience on offer here is almost hyper-realistic in terms of the missions and activities. This is one of the few positive things I will say about Autobahn Police Simulator 3, it effectively captures the mundane day-to-day activities. You’ll find yourself mostly doing routine traffic stops more than you would be pulling out your gun and taking out bad guys. When doing a routine traffic stop, you must verify the driver’s license and vehicle registration and match the information. After which you can inspect the vehicle. You have to make sure that turn signals and brake lights are working and you can check tire tread depth. You can also inspect the car trunk and check its contents. And if you happen to find alcohol in the trunk, that’ll give you justifiable cause to administer a breathalyzer test for DUIs. If you find the vehicle non-compliant, you can issue a fine or even arrest someone depending on the severity. 

That’s not to say there aren’t any action-oriented missions either. The more you progress in the game, the greater the variety of missions will open up. The story missions are the game’s way of introducing the player to new abilities and mission types, which can then be used in side missions and random encounters. Of course, I was looking forward to the action side of things. But I had to get halfway through the game to unlock robbery missions. However, these missions were perhaps the biggest letdown. The shooting mechanics are laughably bad and would be unacceptable even by PS2 standards. The game claims to have stealth mechanics, but they were so incompetent to the point of being non-existent.

Grand Theft Autobahn

Right away the various issues become apparent once the characters start speaking. The voice acting is nothing short of horrendous. I once stated that the vocal performances are comparable to Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties, which for those of you familiar with that reference, it’s not a compliment. That was sort of an exaggeration, but not by much. I’d say it’s somewhere between Plumbers and Shenmue. I wish there was an option to have the spoken dialogue be in German. For one, it would add a layer of authenticity to the experience. Secondly, it would also hide the bad acting, as I find it difficult to detect a bad vocal performance when spoken in a foreign language. 

Graphics aren’t anything to write home about either, as they’re about as well as you’d find in games from the early PS3/Xbox 360 era. The character models are hideous and look like lifeless dolls, the background environments are subpar. In terms of performance, it runs about as well as a PlayStation 4 running Cyberpunk 2077 on launch day. Mind you I’m playing Autobahn Police Simulator 3 on a current-gen Xbox Series X and I was encountering stuttering and skipping frame rates with an egregious amount of texture pop-ins.

Even playing this game was problematic as controls can tend to be unresponsive at times and the vehicle handling is poor, to say the least. They handle like tanks and they don’t stop on a dime. I would often have to apply both the brakes and the handbrake just to turn a corner. Circling back to the invisible walls I mentioned before, running into one or even colliding with a small object like a stop sign when driving would often lead to hilarious physics glitches. Lastly, you’ll find yourself constantly fighting the camera, as it tends to collide with hidden objects and those bloody invisible walls. This is especially apparent when walking around indoors at police headquarters.

Final Thoughts

In case it isn’t already apparent, I can’t in good conscience recommend Autobahn Police Simulator 3 to anyone. This is quite a shame because I wanted to enjoy this game. I was sold solely on the premise alone. Despite everything wrong with this game, there is a kernel of something resembling a good idea here. I appreciated the fact that this is not an action-oriented game, instead focusing on the attention to detail in conveying the everyday life of a highway patrol officer and the mundane tasks associated with it. You just have to get accustomed to clunky controls, awkward physics, and bad shooting mechanics all the while experiencing it with extreme frame rate dips and subpar graphics, regardless of your hardware’s power. I wish it were better, and I’m sure it could be better with updates, patches, and even perhaps some DLC. But at the end of the day, Autobahn Police Simulator 3 has shovelware written all over it.

 

This review is based on an Xbox copy of Autobahn Police Simulator 3  provided by UberStrategist for coverage purposes. It is also available on PlayStation and PC via Steam.