NARC

"N.A.R.C.: Whether You Walk The Line or Not, It Doesn't Matter"

N.A.R.C. is the kinda game that isn't really a disappointment, but could've been so much more. You play a pair of undercover police officers (one a DEA agent, one a standard issue cop) trying to hunt down a new designer drug imported from China.

Story: 7/10

The story isn't half bad, for a $20 game. It's relatively interesting, though nothing you haven't seen a dozen times before on some half-rate cop TV show or special. Though I won't drop a spoiler in here, it does hit a pretty bad point at what I call the "Soylent Green Cutscene". You'll see what I mean. The most frustrating part would have to be how meaningless your actions are. With a phrase on the box like "Will you walk the line, or cross it?", you'd think doing obscene amounts of drugs and accepting a bribe to destroy evidence would impact the story, at least a little bit (sorta like the alternate endings for Oddworld). However, your actions are completely meaningless to the story. Smoking everything in sight and killing anything that moves means only a five-minute time out before you can pick up the story again, nothing worse.

Graphics: 7/10

Bad, but not immensely so. The cars are rolling deathmobiles (which can get pretty irritating after the first few times they kill you), but serve no real purpose. There aren't a whole lot of skins either, so you'll see the same people over and over and over and over...you get my point. The cities are nice though; the environment looks really nice and adds to the feel of being on the "mean streets", for they do indeed look mean. The drug-induced hallucinations are pretty sweet too. The cutscenes aren't the sharpest out there, but hey, it IS a $20 game.

Sound: 8/10

The sound is pretty good. Decent comments from the citizens you bust, beat up for fun, or jus bump into. The best feature, though is the changing ambient music. Depending on where you are in the city, the song you hear in the background changes, and its a pretty good selection to be sure. Decent voice acting (correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that Bruce Willis' partner in Sin City playing the junkie cop?), and the creepy sounds you hear while tripping out on the various drugs really adds to the visual effects.

Gameplay: 4/10
Alright, here's where it gets downright ugly. I won't even talk about the awkward as hell shooting controls (suffice to say they suck). The game goes from "Pathetically Easy" to "Prepare to Die, Foolish Gamer" in a heartbeat. In the U.S. city, the missions are a breeze, citizens are so easy to bust you can do it with one finger, and your badge rating can be kept at 100 even if you gun down a cop every 30 seconds. Then, its off to Hong Kong, where even the school girls will throw your ass through a glass window within nanoseconds of trying to arrest them. The only way to arrest perps is to beat them within an inch of their lives, THEN arrest them once they're passed out on the pavement, and even that is hard because they all are martial arts experts. Your badge rating also drops after picking up drugs, making it difficult just to maintain your badge rating even when being a model police officer. The missions get insanely hard, with nearly indestructable miniguns appearing late in the game that kill you in seconds, and can only be destroyed by two weapons. Even worse, the game doesn't even provide you with enough ammo to destroy all of them, and no way to restart the mission, effectively trapping you if you miss more than one shot (which is easy to do, given how little time you have to line up the shot before dying from gunfire). Selling drugs is outrageously tough since practically no one is buying, and most of those that do are undercover cops (which wouldn't be so bad if the game was about being a good cop, not "will you cross the line or not?"). The copious amounts of cash you stand to make serve only one purpose: buying stuff you don't need. You can either buy more drugs with your cash (which seems pointless, becuase you can bust dealers and get it for free), buy a pill that gets rid of any addiction you have (also pointless, because shaking an addiction is pathetically easy), or buy health pickups (also pointless, since they are friggin' expensive and hardly provide any healing AT ALL). I tried to hire one of the street walkers with my drug money, but they just ignore you, so you can't even get a dirty laugh out of the money.

Final Word:

Well, N.A.R.C. had the potential to be a great, great game. The concept was killer, the sound was great, the graphics needed only minor polishing to truly shine, and the storyline, while not entirely original, was still interesting. The makers just didn't follow through, and that is what kills the whole game. In the end, though, it is still just a $20 game, and I suppose there are worse ways to spend your money.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/09/05