It was my ‘go to’ example for a game that had admittedly overreached, but had heart and promise. Fast forward to 2022, and the sequel was released, which threw a load of new ideas and gameplay mechanics at the wall, but failed incredibly to deal with the basic, fundamental issues that the prequel had. As mentioned, this is the game that I bring up in terms of conversations regarding golden ideas that outreach their grasp.
There’s such a gap in the market for extremely procedural police games – since filled (a bit) by Aesir Interactive’s Police Simulator: Patrol Officers, a game that was also released in a rough state but has since focused on patches, updates and refining the experience – and I genuinely hoped that a possible future sequel would iron out the issues and create a smoother experience.
Cue Autobahn Police Simulator 3 - a game that added features, but caused further performance woes, whilst reigning in the zaniness of the 2nd game in the series. Yes there were more nonsensical dialogue options, broken enhancements, and inherently knackered fundamentals...but now they’ve essentially rebooted with Highway Police Simulator, and it feels like nothing has been learned from previous experience. 
I naively assumed that issued with Autobahn Police Simulator 3 could have possibly been related to coming to terms with development on a new generation of consoles, but alas – that was not the case. The vehicle and on-foot section handling is unfathomable (as is the in-game camera), texture pop-in is more frequent than George Clooney stretching his neck to evoke a sense of irritation in any film pre-1997, badly recorded - and delivered – dialogue is a constant occurrence over dead-eyed character models, and there are controls that actively work against you as you battle your way through barely present tutorials and missions, as quest markers and purposes seem to routinely resolve themselves as you get randomly teleported over the place as you flick through unexplained menus and the camera whizzes around you as your car drifts and spins past myriad other vehicles who have no visible drivers as they pound forever onwards on the motorway in backed-up, lifeless traffic. 
If you’re lucky, your car may randomly stop driving, and genuinely stop allowing you to enter / exit them, resulting in you having to make regular hard-resets of the game to even get moving.
There’s no point in me even talking about the narrative or unlockables, because so few players will ever get to that point of the game, instead probably choosing to uninstall and refund if they are lucky enough to pick this game up on Steam.
I cannot believe that – four years on – this is the game that Aerosoft have released as the newest entry in this series, and make no mistake, it may be called Highway Police Simulator, but this is Autobahn Police Simulator 4. I can only assume that they had retitled the game in the vain hope that everyone would forget how fundamentally broken all of the previous entries were.
At this juncture, there’s no joy in seeing where their games go next, there is seemingly no quality control, certainly no QA, and very little hope that they will release a fully-functioning game in the future. Four years down the line, two games and no lessons learned later, I’m starting to think that my original hope that the Aerosoft simulator games would incrementally improve from the originals was very much misplaced. 
SUMMARY
This is unfortunately an ever-worsening series of games that puts performance at the bottom of the pile – and at this point, I’m not even sure what the developers are aiming for, because it certainly isn’t a functioning game.
Aerosoft have been releasing game simulation games since 2013, and the fact that this is their output over a decade later is quite frankly, embarrassing.
2/10
💦🌊MELTED🌊💦
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