Dead to Rights (XBX)
Reviewed by Susie Vee

One of the hot tickets for this summer was supposed to be Dead to Rights, Namco’s third-person action shooter. The game generated a ton of buzz because of its John-Woo-style gun battles and Max Payne-derived game mechanics. Unfortunately, Rights gets it wrong most of the time. Despite some ingenious concepts and a lot of potential, Dead to Rights comes off half-baked, as if a few more months of development would have been a good idea.

The story is your typical cop-framed-for-murder-on-the-run tale. This time around, you’re Jack Slate (can we have a moratorium on clichéd action-hero names like this? What’s next, Bruno Howitzer?) and you patrol the fictional Grant City along with your K-9 partner, Shadow. The scripting is especially lazy, with a murdered relative and a frame-up leading to the most unrealistic prison sequence we’ve ever seen. (Apparently death row prisoners, even on the eve of their fast-track executions, have free run of the prison).

You’ll also run into most of the other cop game stalwarts, like random thugs, strippers, massage parlor girls and various ethnic stereotypes. While the fugitive cop genre seems to be a boys-only club, there are several important female characters. Too bad they all seem to be strippers or floozies of one sort or another. One of the game’s early sequences involves Jack watching a ridiculously long dance routine in a strip club. It would be offensive if it weren’t so dull. It’s hard to imagine anyone would be excited by this pixilated faux T&A.

All this would be excusable if the gameplay were up to snuff. But sadly, it’s not.

Jack’s controls are a little funky, with the auto-aiming being more of a hindrance than anything else. The camera seems to be off at lunch somewhere, leaving you to swing it around (very slowly) with the right analog stick on the fly. The game’s bullet-time-style slow-motion is also frustrating, as a bad camera angle can leave you floating through the air with nothing you can target.

Some of the cooler aspects are the various disarms Jack can perform on armed thugs. These animated bits show Jack ripping the gun out of a thug’s hand and dispatching him with some amusing move. But in reality, you’ll rarely use this, as it necessitates walking right up to a bad guy without a weapon in your hands.

More useful is the ability to use a thug as a human shield. This’ll protect you from some damage, and it looks pretty cool. But you’re slowed down to a crawl while you do this, so moving around with a human shield is slow going at best.

Another interesting part of the game is Shadow, your faithful police dog (don’t ask how, but Shadow ends up in prison with you). You can arm Shadow like a weapon and send him after a targeted bad guy. Shadow will dispatch the thug and return with his weapon, after which he’ll disappear while his attack meter recharges.

We’re not really sure where Shadow goes between attacks, but he can be useful in getting out of a tight squeeze. But many times the game simply won’t allow you send Shadow up against a particular enemy, and those are usually the ones you’d really want to use him for. After an attack, Shadow runs off somewhere to rest, but can be used again in a few minutes. And no, don’t even ask, Shadow is seemingly a bulletproof dog, so there’s no way to get him snuffed.

Besides basic gunplay, you’ll also find loads (too much?) of hand-to-hand brawling. But the limited array of moves you have, and the fact that you’re usually facing several foes at once, make this mostly a chore. Also out of the ordinary are several mini-games at strategic points. Most involve lock picking tests or extreme button mashing – reminding us of the old-school track-and-field games of our childhood.

Graphically, the game looks somewhat dated, with blocky characters and boxy, under-detailed locations. Certainly not up to the specs of cutting-edge Xbox titles. Even the Max Payne port looked better.

And, as a final strike, the game is ridiculously – unfairly – difficult. You can’t save between sections, so you’re often trapped repeating a level dozens of times. The trick seems to be going through a section enough times to learn the patterns of the bad guys and figure out, through trial-and-error, the perfect path through a particular level.

With all the pre-release buzz around it, Dead to Rights was on our must-play lists for a long time. While it’s not a bad game, after all that hype, we think we deserved a little more attention to detail.

SCORE: 6.5