While it’s great to see indie games that are treated a bit like a playground of different ideas when they’re all clicking and working well, there’s absolutely a risk in spreading yourself a little thin. Finding a balance between changing things up enough to be surprising and keep the player's attention, and giving each element you’ve implemented the time and care to be worthwhile, I don’t doubt is a challenge. Unfortunately, in the case of Karma City Police, it feels like the developer couldn’t quite decide on what the focus should be, working with play as a call dispatcher, a bit of workplace drama, and some mini game action into its relatively modest runtime… but not really sticking the landing on any of them.

In the game you’ll play as a new recruit, brought into the local police station to field emergency calls as a dispatcher. The somewhat irreverent tone is set quickly with some of the snappy dialogue you’ll have with your co-workers, the lousy condition of the equipment you have to work with, and being the lowest rung on the workplace totem pole. That means that when you’re done getting through a batch of calls, you’ll need to engage in a variety of menial tasks like getting people coffee and more. If things get heated, you may even get into a fight, which amusingly enough is handled with a pinball mini game of all things.

The problem is that none of these elements feels as fleshed out as they should be. While most gamers likely haven’t run into playing an indie game where you work as a call dispatcher, there are quite a few out there and some of them have been pretty great, even if narrow in focus. Whether the appeal is an element of real-world drama or other more creative complications in differentiating real calls from fake ones, most of them leave the dispatch elements here in the dust. Perhaps there’s a challenge of your constrained resources in figuring out what to deploy, but the calls are generally dull, just missing some more interesting element. Worse, sometimes your performance scores don’t make much sense and aren’t explained so there’s no way to understand what you could do better. In terms of the workplace drama, while some may find it fun, for me it felt more like filler. There, but not outrageous or silly enough to stand out. Finally, though you’d think the pinball hook would win me over, unfortunately the behavior of the “ball” in relation to your flipper use didn’t feel right in a few ways, also diminishing its appeal.

In the end, there’s some rough charm here, but the gameplay side of the bargain really comes up too short to prop it up as clearly being worthwhile. It would be one thing if we were still in the earlier days of indie games, when perhaps the quirk and oddity of it all would have more appeal. Unfortunately, the indie roster has gotten to be pretty deep though, so this effort just can’t quite justify itself outside of pretty niche appeal.