Dead to Rights

"The essential Max Payne Clone."

With the amount of action games that you find streaming the market, you have clones of other, more successful games that don’t do quite as well, but still stack up with action. For the most part, you have games that come in the form of Dead to Rights, a game that has all the makings of Max Payne, but without the extremely gritty story attached to it. While Dead to Rights has plenty of action and violence {the apparent staple of any good action game} there are a few things that you’ll find here to be a little unappealing. Puzzles, mini-games and furious gun executions greet you from the start, but just how well does it stack up in the long run?

The Story

The story is something that you’ve seen before, mainly in Max Payne in which you take control of a good cop that has gotten himself into a little bit of a mess. After defending Grant City and making a name for himself as a clean and tough cop, Jack Slate has been framed for a murder he did not commit. With corruption rampant throughout his beloved city and apparently the police force that he has served in, Jack is on a one man mission to clear his name and find his father’s killer. The story line is something that has been used, abused and for all intents and purposes, been blown every which way for quite some time. Considering that you have the makings for a cheaply made action movie here in just the plot, you’ll have to wonder what the rest of the game unfolds to be.

The Game Play

Dead to Rights is essentially your run of the mill action game that puts more emphasis on the sown and dirty fighting than it does anything else. Everything that you have at your disposal all depends on just how much you’re willing to take and how badly you want the next weapon in the line up. A small introduction to the game mechanics will teach you all of the rules that you’ll need to learn such as the disarming techniques and the ways that you can fight. More importantly, you’ll be able to learn how to use your canine partner in most situations to not only take out enemies from a distance, but traverse areas that are impossible for you in order to make it through certain points in the stages.

As you progress further into the game, you’ll find that the main portion of the game is to simply acquire a weapon, make a lock on the nearest enemy and simply start blasting. Once you have a good, powerful weapon in your hand, the use of the dog is pretty much limited to getting through one of the few puzzles that require him and after that, you’re on your own. If you’re caught without a weapon, you can punch and kick your way to victory with a few combinations that are both powerful and useful, but you might find that the best way to get around is to simply grab a guy, take his weapon and then pop a cap in his ass in one of several violent disarming moves.

The fighting system that you have in Dead to Rights is much like Max Payne, except that in order to use the dog, or block you have to have a certain amount of adrenaline in order to make the blocking more athletic and the dog accessible. Not only that, but diving in any direction in the slow motion {which we all call Bullet Time} requires you to have a substantial amount of adrenaline to use and really isn’t necessary. Different difficulty levels don’t bring on anything but tougher enemies and when you reach a certain point, even on the easiest setting, you might find the game to be a little difficult to handle. Mini-games are also present in the form of lock picking and even a strip tease, but they do little to help with the action other than give you minimal breaks from the action.

Control in Dead to Rights is essentially the same throughout all of the platform versions in which you have your targeting control and your weapons selection as well as diving and otherwise. The best that I’ve encountered so far has been for the X-Box version of the game and you’ll find that use of the smaller S-Controller really does make a difference when you’re attempting to work through a wave of enemies. Combinations and basic moves as well as some of the more advanced moves are all explained to you in the very short tutorial that brings you into the game. Beginners should be able to pick up on the overall controls in a matter of minutes and veterans to this type of game play should be able to slide right in and start playing.

The Visuals

The Play Station 2 sports some pretty clean and crisp visuals that are complete with explosions, bullet casings flying all over the place and of course, the blood. If you’re looking for some dark and gritty atmospheres, then you’ll find this to be the right place complete with night clubs and dark city alleyways. However, you might find that Dead to Rights lacks some of the more up close and personal details that Max Payne had and you may find that some of the locations are simple connections that really have no variety, but more of a repeating feel. The cinematic sequences in Dead to Rights do not change from version to version, but you’ll find that the Play Station 2 version of the game has a more softer feel than the crisper X-Box version.

The Audio

While the soundtrack is hard hitting and keeps the pace of the game, at certain points you might find yourself looking to hear what’s going on simply because the gunfight sequences take precedence over the music. To say that the music is non-existent would be wrong, but the volume of the music just isn’t there in any of the versions of the game. Voice acting seems to have that dark and forbidding quality to it and really does add to the overall theme of the game. However, the sound effects tend to seem the same in later stages with small differences in the way that the guns all sound when you let them go off. Small clips of enemies yelling at you, and the other characters in the game add a little atmosphere, but can sound rather cheesy when you get into the meat of the title.

The Verdict

Dead to Rights is essentially the same game on all three of the systems with little difference between any of them. With Max Payne being more of a darker and true to life game, Dead to Rights seems to be a cheap copy that adds the same action and theme, but with a different cop and location. If you’re looking for a hard-hitting action game that has nothing but original action to go along with your video game collection, then you might find that this title has little going in the originality portion. The mini-games, while interesting, are really just small diversions to try and keep you from the fact that this is Max Payne with a different exterior. The difficulty in later stages becomes unbearable in some ways and beginners might be discouraged to even continue. Worthy of a weekend rental on any of the big three systems {X-Box, Game Cube, Play Station 2}, Dead to Rights is dead in the water as an overall purchase.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 01/02/03, Updated 01/02/03