It looks like the game industry is still trying to figure out how to accurately harvest the sales benefits of stirring up controversy. Of the big “shocking” games last year, only GTA San Andreas managed to do well in the eyes of reviewers and consumers. The Guy Game, Playboy: The Mansion, Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude and Singles: Flirt up Your Life all tanked, and The Guy Game even got sued.
This year's big PR fiasco has been NARC. Somewhere along the way, someone either at Midway or at Point of View got the bright idea that you should be a Vice Cop who is a connoisseur of vice. So, instead of GTA where you're a punk who goes around beating the snot out of people for cash, now you're a cop who beat the snot out of people, and takes drugs at the same time.
That pretty much instantly put me off on the game, but I figured they might have balanced their errors out by shipping the game out at $20. So, without further ado, time to don the shield and clean a needle.
Word on the Street
You will control two cops, Marcus Hill (voiced by Bill Bellamy) and Jack Frozenski. (voiced by Michael Madsen) The two characters are ex-partners but now Hill is DEA and Frozenski is just a beat cop.
The story starts with Hill cornering a perp with a bunch of cops. He tells them not to fire but they see the guy go for something, and they paste him. The guy drops a syringe and a gun, and with his last ounces of strength, reaches for the syringe and injects himself. He then springs back up and wastes all the backup that was there. Hill chases the guy down and brings him to his deserved end, and has the guys in the lab check out the syringe for whatever it was that cost 8 cops their lives.
The plot will reunite Hill with Frozenski, and you'll alternate between controlling both of them as the game goes on.
Gameplay
The controls are simple. Left analog moves. Triangle is your generic action button, as well as your button for grapple, and cuff. X kicks, and Square punches. O flashes your badge. R1 is your gun and block, L1 is sprint. R2 is various types of jump.
For the most part, the game mechanics are supposed to work pretty easily. You walk up to a drug dealer (who is conveniently displaying an icon over his head) and you hit O to flash your badge. If your cop rep is high enough, they won't want to mess with you, and they'll just surrender for a second or two. If not, you'll have to soften them up, and then mash triangle to fill a gauge. Then the gauge will swing back, and you have to hit X while it's in the target area. (Think the meters from Track & Field and Hot Shots Golf put together.) Then you hit triangle, they get cuffed, and drop their stash. For good measure you can pop a couple knees to the head to see if they're hiding anything else.
After you've pounded on guys for a while, you get the adrenaline pumping, and your Bust meter fills. This doesn't mean you have to go out and buy a manziere, it means that you are now able to perform a WWF move on a perp and take him down in one nice slow-motion display.
Here's where the controversy comes in. If you hit the D-Pad, you'll cycle through 2 inventory modes, 1 where you have all your guns as well as the mission specific equipment, and another mode where you have your fists, and your drugs. If you take the various different drugs, you get a crazy screen effect, as well as various stat boosts. (I have NO idea why crack makes you more accurate with a gun.)
Truth be told, it's honestly more of a pain in the ass to try and cycle through these things in the middle of combat than it's worth. The fight's generally over by the time you manage to figure out what drug is best for the situation at hand. The thing you can do with the drugs within the scope of the game which I found shocking is you can start pushing the drugs yourself. You have the drugs in hand, and you can sell them to passersby for cash. Why someone thought to put this in the game, I will never understand. It's just as easy, if not easier to rough up pushers and take their cash. The only things you can buy in the game are weapons, and they're really easy to come by. Also, no gun really costs all that much.
All this adds up to make a very, very subpar gaming experience. Busting people becomes tedious very quickly. Either they instantly surrender or you get in a fight with them. If you get into a fight, chances are good that you'll try and hit the grapple button. Unfortunately, some genius in design over at Point of View decided to give the perps an unblockable grapple counter. So before the button mashing seuqence initiates, they're throwing you to the ground. Apparently, someone didn't think it was that big of a deal, because it only happens, like 15 out of 16 times.
Giving the player no camera control and having to fight pushers near the sides of buildings was another phenomenally brilliant idea by one of the designers there, too. How exactly am I supposed to know what's going on?
Your "Rep Meter" is a joke, as all you have to do is bust some pushers and prostitutes, and drop the drugs in the evidence depository to fill raise your rep really quick. As far as I can tell the only thing it's good for is not getting you thrown off the case, and you have a higher probability of the pushers surrendering to you outright. But aside from that, it's just another loosely taped on addition to gameplay that in the end only serves to help illuminate how shallow the core of NARC really is.
Graphics
Think Grand Theft Auto but just with less of everything. Fewer cars, fewer people, smaller maps, less detail. Some of the cutscenes look decent, but there's really not much to look at in NARC. On top of that, it's night and someone seemed to have borrowed the mood lighting from DOOM III because it's hard as hell to see anything.
Audio
Michael Madsen does a damn fine job with his role as Frozenski (Who the hell came up with these names?!) and Bill Bellamy is shockingly serviceable as Marcus Hill. I figure, there's probably 4 black celebrities that are less able to pull off a gangster/tough guy role: the Gumbels, Alfonso Ribeiro, and LL Cool J. At least Carlton and LL are kind of built, so maybe that's a toss-up.
Once you get to Hong Kong the majority of the Asian voices are done by...*gasp* Asian people! There's a difference between an Asian person speaking stilted English, and some guy trying to act like he's an Asian guy speaking stilted English. One of them sounds accurate, and the other's an insult. One of the very few things this game actually managed to do right.
The other thing the game did right was the song selection. I wish they would have went with Ice-T's version of "I'm Your Pusher", the one where he dogs LL Cool J, but aside from that, nearly every track in the game is worth a listen, even the obligatory in-game shout out to the game track is all right. However, with the music switching tracks from area to area, and the city being so small, you'll end up switching through 3-4 different songs in the span of a minute sometimes, and that's fairly annoying.
Gripes
Why don't any of these discount games have the jump control done correctly? You figure that wouldn't be THAT hard to code, but both Gungrave: Overdose and this game have problems with the jump button doing the exact wrong jump at the wrong time.
The scripted events in this game are stupid. There's one sequence where you need to photograph a bunch of guys on the basketball court. I spent all this time trying out different vantage points trying to get the last photo, but the game wouldn't realize that I had the guy dead in the viewfinder, head on. If I didn't take the shot from the position the game demanded, it didn't count. The sniping missions are lame, too...shoot the people in the wrong order, and it ends the game. Fun times!
Speaking of sniping...why do I get a grenade launcher to take out snipers? Why not give me a sniper rifle? Instead, I have to hope that the thing is lobbing the grenade correctly, or it's going to look like I'm coming with the sniper to see who can kill the most civilians. What were you guys thinking?
It was nice that you got the authentic Asian voice actors to help you out with the Hong Kong section of the game. Now why didn't you do any research on Hong Kong? Roppongi is in JAPAN, not Hong Kong.
Why can you only carry a certain amount of each drug? Do your special issue LSD pockets get full or something? Gotta make sure you don't mix your weed with your crack?
Why give the player the ability to deal drugs? It's completely superfluous and offensive at the same time. All you get for dealing is a minor amount of extra cash. You can earn this cash really quickly by gambling or beating up pushers/prostitutes. On top of that, there's nothing to spend money on in the game, anyway! Why did you designers tack this on? This goes well above and beyond just partaking and getting completely irrational benefits from it...selling the drugs essentially gets you nothing, and serves to alienate nearly everyone decent who's considering buying the game.
Overall
Parents, keep this one away from kids. Not that it's worth playing in any way, shape or form, but there's way, way more in this game than you're ever going to want your kid to touch. As for the adults...keeps this one away from your console. Aside from hearing what decently cast voice acting sounds like and hearing Michael Madsen give an excellent performance in 6-10 hours of bad gameplay, there's absolutely no reason to touch this game, even at $20.
