DS Review: C.O.P. The Recruit

Publisher: Ubisoft
Price: $29.99
Genre: Crime Fighting Sandbox
Verdict: Technically impressive, weak on everything else.  Get Chinatown Wars over this.
Acquired: Review Copy Provided
Pros: Shows that the DS still has technical power to be unleashed.  NYC is rendered awesomely on the DS.  A lot to do in the game.
Cons: Bad controls, goofy animations, ho hum story line, and the constant feel of a stripped down GTA game.

This is the story of Dan Miles (no relation to Desmond Miles of Assassin’s Creed fame).  Dan is a top notch street racer who gets ganked by the cops.  The cops must have seen a glimmer of hope in this young punk, as they offer Dan a job as a cop right before the cuffs get slapped on.  Once on the force, Dan is tasked with trying to figure out why a fellow detective has been falsely arrested.

This game offers a lot to keep the player busy.  Drug raids, police chases, bank robberies, and super sleuthing can all be had at one point or another.  While heading to a story objective, the police radio will chime in with some secondary crime that is going on.  Taking on these secondary crimes is all voluntary.  They won’t net any extra cash, new weapons, armor, or anything beneficial outside of breaking up the gameplay.  This does help with just mindlessly running around the city doing odd jobs.  Keep in mind though, fail any mission and it is game over. All these missions add up to a pretty good amount of time in the game.  Just playing through the normal story missions will net about 15 – 20 hours of game play.  Add to this all the side missions that can be taken on, and it can be a lengthy game.

This game is fairly difficult.  Bank robberies are often met with large amounts of gun fire and Dan taking a dirt nap.  Dan must have forgotten how to street race as well, as the car chases tend to end with the bad guy winning.  The difficulty is  “helped” by the fact Dan must be running around with a BB Gun.  Crooks will often take a full clip, or more, before finally going down.  There is a tremendous sense of accomplishment when completing one of these missions.  This game often got the “Hell Yeah, Bitches!” reaction when finally beating a mission after a dozen trips to the pearly gates.

This game looks amazing.  Ubisoft has done wonders on how much gets displayed on the screen at one time.  Buildings, trees, people, objects on the sidewalk, water, and a cloudy sky all fill the screen with glorious eye crack.  Hitting a mailbox with the car will have letters flying all over, while hitting a tree will have it falling to pieces.  The thing that really makes this impressive is that there is no slow down. NYC has also been rendered in great detail for the DS.  Major landmarks for NYC all find their way into the game.  Though there is a lot of eye candy to be had, all this detail has led to blocky textures.  It is a small gripe for all the positives that the game pulls off on the graphical end of things.

While the graphics absolutely shine with how much can be displayed on the screen, some attention was pulled away from the animations.  Dan runs like his knees were amputated in some nasty car accident.  It’s just odd to see Dan run or sprint.  This oddness carries over to the pedestrians as well; they have some super Spidey-Sense of knowing when the car is about to hit them and will make odd leaps of faith out of the way.  This ends up looking more like a stiff magnetic doll being thrown onto a magnetic roadway.

What really pulls away from the game experience is the horrid controls.  For whatever reason, there is no sensitivity setting for the stylus.  This causes the shooting aspect of the game to be harder than necessary, as aiming often requires multiple swipes with the stylus.  Couple this with having to walk around with the d-pad and turn with the face buttons, it all adds to a cumbersome control scheme.  Most of this could have been avoided with better stylus controls, especially if they’d been given some Prozac to help with their sensitivity.

Driving is not much better on the control front.  Some vehicles handle well enough, but most feel as though they are stuck in the mud.  Once these vehicles are moving, though, they handle like an ice storm has just rocked the streets.  The interaction of the cars with the environment is frustrating at best.  Dan can be speeding along, rear-end another car, and that car will simply veer off course while Dan comes to an almost complete stop.  Hitting oncoming traffic will cause a dead stop of both vehicles.  When the mission calls for chasing down a criminal in a car, this is hugely frustrating, as most of the mission time is spent playing chase the weasel.

Although there are a fair amount of missions, the variety is on the thin side.  Chasing down a car once or twice is fine; after the sixth time it is just mundane.  The cool stealth-style missions are fun, but too few and far between to really enjoy them.  Overall, the missions pan out to nothing more than “run here, stop this criminal for doing the same thing the last criminal was doing.” This is not compelling game play.

C.O.P. The Recruit nails a lot on the visual side of things.  Unfortunately, it fails on delivery as a whole.  Poor controls, odd animations, repetitive mission types, and weak story presentation all work against this game.  It is hard not to compare this to Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, but the gameplay feels  stripped down as compared to GTA.  This game is great for those that can’t get enough GTA-esque gameplay, or who don’t like violence, hookers, and drugs.  Those looking for the next epic-storied sandbox game are better off loading up GTA for one more trip around the block.

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