NARC

"A decent attempt at a remake which fails. Good for a standalone game, though."

NARC. What a hilarious game back in the day. It was basically telling the little punks of the day, "Die by the drugs, or by this really big mother-****ing bazooka I've got here." In the original, you were playing a badass police-enforcer who tore the streets apart with endless rocket fire to prevent drugs from poisoning the streets. Now, in the re-make of the classic arcade game, you can make the choice of destroying the drugs...or taking them yourself.

It's highly controversial. You might be thinking, "So if you take the drugs, a cop will come and arrest you and it's Game Over?"...No, it's not like that. Drugs are encouraged in this game! Each drug has it's own special ability linked to it. The gameplay is highly altered depending on what drug you do take. For example, grab some hash and weed and light up, the whole world goes all slow and blurry. Think of it as Max Payne's bullet time. But it doesn't end there. Popping a couple of LSD tabs brings out the worst in people, literally, as evil do-ers are personified by large evil heads, making it easy to tell who's a perp. Speed? Why, everything goes double time of course! Crack? BESERKER MODE! It's highly fun to play around with the different drugs, but there is a down side to this mode of gameplay...

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Smoking too many of those spliffs and you might grow to depend on them. And it's not just that, if you're seen with the spliff and you're as high as a kite, you might just be spotted, arrested and then demoted to that of a lowly street cop. BUSTED! There is the ability to redeem one's self in the form of 'rehab'. Rehab is not you sitting on a beanbag for a couple of hours talking about how you need to eat cold chicken or whatever. Instead, it's apart of a series of button hitting sequences in a memory-type game.

Combat plays a part in the game, but I can't help but feel it's too over the top. It's a series game of button mashing punch-ups, kicks and shoot-ups. Mass slaughter makes the cop image ever so slightly contradicting:

"I'm a cop who serves and protects the good people of this town from drugs but I'm not afraid to aimlessly blow up the streets with my rockets to do so."

The graphics aren't polished and are the big letdown for the game, but it's to be fair, it's what you expect with this sort of game. It's a nice game, promising features, but let down slightly with the execution side of the game. Excellent use of the drug-use system.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/07/05