Dead to Rights (PS2)

There’s a time an a place for fisticuffs and this isn’t it.

Jack Slate, general tough cop and all-round hero, is casually reading a book in his local public library as thugs begin firing around him, placing bombs and swarming around the area. Shadow, his dog, starts picking them off one at a time as the villains notice Slate. Hiding behind a corner, he pushes a trolley with a CO2 extinguisher on top of it towards them and they notice a quickly written post-it note stuck to the red casing that reads “Freeze”. No sooner has that been done than the protagonist ducks around the corner and shoots the canister, exploding all but one of his enemies off the balcony. The final person in his way is swiftly thrown off, with Slate landing on top of him.

All too quickly there is more trouble. As gunfire erupts around our hero, with him taking out waves of masked thugs, diving around and jumping off walls in a Matrix-esque fashion the detonation time ticks away. By this time, Shadow has found the bomb and brings it straight to home, with Slate disarming it leaving 0.03 seconds to spare… and that’s just the intro. Unfortunately, that is also ‘just’ the intro.

Great Expectations

The extinguisher from the intro. It's all downhill from here.

With such a great intro it’s a real shame that the rest of the cinematics aren’t as good quality, but the game does reward you at the end of each of the fifteen chapters with some plot development, most of which is pure cliché, but still works pretty well. Fortunately the ending is quite satisfying and final, which goes a long way to wrap up Dead to Rights as a solid whole. The game, as you may have guessed, sets you as a cop in the once gold rich Grant City, with you trying to get revenge for your fathers death, and clear yourself from various accusations. In a Max Payne style third person perspective you must shoot and fight your way through waves of enemies to progress through the various locations.

Diving around shooting in slow motion has been gracefully ‘borrowed’ from Max Payne, Enter the Matrix and plenty of other examples and although it’s perfectly acceptable, it doesn’t feel as revolutionary or as well executed as other games we’ve seen it in. In fact, the game itself doesn’t look up to the standards of most PS2 games around. The character models are perfectly acceptable and the animation isn’t bad, but the levels themselves are very repetitive, often making you traipse through ten rooms and corridors at a time that all look the same.

Methods of execution

You're right: the graphics don't look very good.

Killing people always seems to come down to a few choices, with a particular technique always being much better than the rest in each situation. Shadow, your dog, can instantly appear and kill an enemy if you choose, once his special bar reaches the top or you can simply shoot everybody or, on the rare occasions when you are left without a weapon, beat them up. If you ever find yourself against an armed enemy with only your hands to protect you, once you get close enough, a special disarm move (out of plenty available) can be executed which does look great and instantly kills them while taking their weapon. If you try a similar thing when you are armed you’ll take the person as a human shield while you blast everyone else.

The violence involved in the game really does look pretty good (aside from the backgrounds where it takes place), but feels immensely repetitive. Normally it will be a case of clearing an area, running forward a short way until more baddies appear, dispatching them and repeating until reaching a boss or a very regular (but mercifully short) loading segment.

Everyone hates their boss

Toss and Shoot, it's the new craze with kids everywhere.

Most of the end bosses (of which there are a good number) have to be dispatched in some special way, either by throwing CO2 canisters at them and shooting them in mid air or by waiting until they attack you and get dazed. One foe even turns on some gas and while trying to cause damage to him you’re also fighting over the single gas mask, so the variety is certainly appealing. If you fail to defeat them however, you are always asked if you would like to continue (in the rest of the game too) and will then resume play from the previous loading section, which makes the game a lot easier to play through – since if you fail anything you can immediately try again.

Variety also comes in a number of mini-games, which can be played separately from the title screen after you’ve encountered them in the game. Lock picking and surviving torture seem to be the standard type, but you are also required to disarm bombs and even play a Parappa the Rapper styled pole dancing simulator (very bizarre, and understandably strangely pleasurable at the same time). These short segments do in some way break up the repetitive enemy killing that fills the rest of the six odd hour game.

Learning the ropes

Here Shep! Here boy!

A pretty decent tutorial starts you off with learning all of the controls and features, but the disappointing aspect to this is that a few of the things you learn will never be used again. Using Shadow to open up your path is only ever used in the tutorial, so it feels like a feature that was never used to its full potential.

Other aspects of the game annoyed me more than the abandoned features that complicate the learning process for no reason. One of the worst of these is the nasty sound bug whenever you save the game, where the last second of sound played repeats after saving until the next level loads. This is most frustrating when you keep hearing a word of dialogue repeated or just a drum riff half complete over and over. Fortunately the rest of the music does work quite well and although I didn’t catch any tunes I couldn’t get out of my head the events that took place were complimented by the soundtrack.

Nothing like a good voice over

I said sit, not sh...

Voice acting, which used to be skimped on in game design is coming into the mainstream much more nowadays and in this case is performed nicely. Jack Slate’s constant narration, even mid-level isn’t too annoying and quite entertaining in most cases, with well written witty one-liners plastered around the cinematics and levels. Other characters sound good for their roles and don’t really have any bad features, although sound wise, nothing is particularly fresh and most audio used does seem to be mostly uninspired cliché material that we’ve heard a hundred times before.

With all of the chapters, FMVs and mini-games gradually being unlocked on the title screen as you play through the game, it is a shame that nothing at all was added as a bonus for completion, unlike many modern titles, leaving you with an identical experience (or a varying difficulty) to draw you back. This, like most of the game, doesn’t bring anything too negative to the running, but it very much reduces each aspect to an average standing. Jack Slate considers that “fortunes are either won or lost in Grant City every day and if you’ve not won, then you’re probably dead”. This can’t be applied to the game however, since it’s neither a winner nor a loser, more like the middle ground you use to judge others by. But if you were up for a repetitive but interesting interactive action movie, then I’d recommend renting it before you consider a purchase.