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DEAD TO RIGHTS
Well…if Max Payne had a little brother that worked in the K-9 unit, his name would be Jack Slate. Slate is the hero of Namco’s recently released Dead To Rights. I don’t know what’s up with the recent glut of “M”-ature titles being released on PS2 lately, but I guess this all started w/GTA3 and Mr. Payne. I can only imagine what the development cycle was like for this game. “Quick, Rockstar just came out with a mature title about a framed cop! Ok, lets frame this cop, give him slow-mo abilities and make it REALLY bloody. Oh, and throw a few strippers in too, except we’re going to call it Dead to Rights.”
Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit there, but there are more than a few similarities between DTR and Rockstar’s Max Payne, and that’s fine. It’s not DTR’s Payne-ish qualities that make it bad; it’s the actual gameplay. DTR starts off pretty cool. Like I said, it’s the story of a cop framed for a crime he didn’t commit all while hunting down his father’s killer.
The first level of the game takes you through a tutorial for all of Slate’s different moves. You’re then thrown into the regular levels to make your way through, with little hint boxes popping up now and then. The standout feature in DTR is the way it makes you perform tasks you normally wouldn’t in a game like this. For example, Slate needs to sneak past some bouncers in a strip club. In order to do this, the player takes control of Slate’s stripper friend and distracts the bouncers through rhythmic taps of the controller’s buttons. You will also find yourself competing in weight lifting and arm wrestling contests as well as picking locks through an ingenious almost “slot machine” like system.
Unfortunately, for all these cool little innovations, the majority of the gameplay boils down to “shoot everyone, survive as long as you can, who needs strategy”. I understand some of you mongoloids probably love a game like that, and that’s cool, but I honestly wouldn’t spend my hard earned $50 on it. This is definitely a rental to kick around for a weekend, nothing more.
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