Here’s the thing about the simulation genre: it’s an addiction built on the mundane. You don’t play these games for the cinematic set pieces or the Oscar-worthy dialogue. You play them because there is a strange, quiet satisfaction in following the rules when the rest of the world feels chaotic. That’s why I’ve clocked more hours in Police Simulator: Patrol Officers than I care to admit to my friends who are busy grinding rank in Valorant. So, when the Contraband Expansion dropped, promising to trade the parking tickets of Brighton for the high-stakes tension of border control, I was ready. I had my coffee, my rig was purring, and I was prepared to protect the State of Franklin.

The premise here is solid. Actually, it’s better than solid; it’s the exact kind of procedural puzzle that makes games like Papers, Please legendary, just transposed into a 3D space with nicer lighting. You aren’t chasing speeders anymore. You are the gatekeeper. You sit in a booth, you check passports, you look for nervous tics, and you decide who gets into the state and who gets a pair of chrome bracelets. On paper, it’s a brilliant pivot for the franchise. It moves the gameplay from the fluid, often janky open world to a controlled environment where the developers should have been able to tighten the screws.

I wanted to love the rhythm of it. You wave a car forward, check the driver’s face against their ID, scan the cargo manifest, and maybe spot a crate of illegal firearms hidden behind some innocuous boxes of bananas. When it works, it hits that flow state hard. You feel like a detective, using the new tools like the under-vehicle inspection mirror or the UV scanner to find things the naked eye misses. Finding a brick of narcotics taped to a gas tank gives you this little rush of dopamine that justifies the twenty minutes of paperwork you just did.

However, and this is a massive “however,” the execution feels like it’s fighting you every step of the way.

If you’ve been in the Steam reviews or lurking in the Discord channels, you know the vibe right now is… tense. And honestly? It’s justified. The technical state of this expansion on launch was rough. I’m running a rig that eats Cyberpunk 2077 for breakfast, yet Police Simulator still manages to stutter and hitch like it’s trying to load a 4K texture on a floppy disk. It’s not just frame rates, either. It’s the logic.

The game features an “Intuition System” which is supposed to help you spot suspicious behavior. But in practice, it often feels like the game is punishing you for having working eyeballs. You see a car swerving? Logic dictates you pull them over. But if you act before the game’s UI tells you they are nervous, you get penalized for an unjustified stop. It creates this maddening disconnect where you are smarter than your avatar, forced to wait for a text prompt to catch up to reality. It breaks the immersion so hard it hurts.

Then there are the bugs. Oh, the bugs. We aren’t talking about funny visual glitches where a car floats away, though I saw plenty of those. We’re talking about game-breaking logic errors. I spent a long time trying to figure out why I was losing Conduct Points, the game’s currency of trust, for correctly denying entry to someone with an expired passport. It turns out, the game logic just decided I was wrong. Imagine playing a shooter where your bullets heal the enemy at random, and you start to understand the frustration. You feel less like an officer of the law and more like a beta tester paying for the privilege of filing bug reports.

And speaking of paying, we have to talk about the price. Nineteen bucks for the expansion alone? That is a bold ask, especially when the Season Pass is sitting right there for five dollars more, bundling in a bunch of other content. It feels like a classic upsell strategy, which wouldn’t bother me so much if the core product felt finished. But asking twenty dollars for a DLC that introduces more bugs than features is a tough pill to swallow.

The new vehicle, the Titan Police SUV, is another mixed bag. It looks aggressive. It looks like it could drive through a brick wall. But get behind the wheel, and it handles like a shopping cart on a frozen lake. I know, I know, driving physics in these sims are never Forza quality, but this thing lacks any sense of weight. You try to perform a PIT maneuver on a fleeing suspect, and instead of a satisfying crunch of metal, you bounce off them like you’re both made of rubber. It saps the tension right out of the chases.

You might be wondering how this stacks up against the indie darling Contraband Police. That game is gritty, ugly, and stressful in a way that feels intentional. It has shootouts and ambushes. Police Simulator, by comparison, feels sterile. It’s the corporate, sanitized version of border patrol. That’s not necessarily bad if you want a chill “job simulator” vibe, but it lacks the narrative punch of its competitors. You aren’t making moral choices here; you are checking boxes.

Yet, despite the invisible walls, the disappearing suspects, and the baffling penalties, I found myself playing it until 2 AM last night. Why? Because the fantasy is strong. There is a specific community of us who just want to roleplay as a cop without the real-world baggage, and when the stars align, when the traffic flows, the framerate holds, and you catch a smuggler with a trunk full of contraband, it is genuinely fun. The new tools add a layer of tactile interaction that the base game was missing. Physically crouching to sweep a mirror under a chassis adds a physicality to the search that clicking menus just can’t replicate.

The developers, Aesir Interactive, have been pushing hotfixes, which is a good sign. They fixed some of the most egregious logic errors quickly, acknowledging that the launch was, well, less than ideal. That responsiveness counts for something. It shows they care about the ecosystem they’ve built, even if they struggle to keep the code clean.

So, where does that leave us?

If you are a hardcore fan of the genre, you probably already bought this. You know the “jank” is part of the deal. You laugh when a suspect teleports through a fence because, hey, that’s just Police Simulator. But if you’re a casual player looking for a polished experience? You might want to wait. Let the patches roll out. Let the modding community do their thing. There is a great game buried under here, hidden like a stash of drugs in a gas tank, but you’re going to have to work to find it.

For now, the Police Simulator Contraband Expansion is a conceptual win and a technical stumble. It expands the world and the mechanics in meaningful ways, but it trips over its own shoelaces with performance issues and logic gaps that punish you for playing correctly. It’s frustrating, it’s messy, and it’s weirdly compelling. I’ll see you at the border, just don’t blame me if my patrol car decides to launch itself into orbit.

Overall Rating: 2.5 out of 5