Dead to Rights for the PSP - do guns, lots of shooting, and bullet time always make for a good game? Find out inside!
It seems a little harsh, so I’ll say something positive – the graphics and animations are quite a treat for your eyes. But really it doesn’t matter, since your eyes won’t be looking at that after 5 minutes with Dead to Rights. They’ll be looking at those fleshly, flaps of skin that cover your eyes whilst you sleep. It’s really that dull.
The game has an incredibly pointless story. A woman has been kidnapped and you must save her. Why? You just happen to know her, of course! It’s all quite irrelevant really, since the game merely entails running into one room, shooting a load of enemies and then moving onto the next room, to do it all again. There are some bosses every few levels or so, and I use bosses in the loosest possible sense – they’re merely regular bad guys with an extra health bar meaninglessly tacked on. No weak points, special weapons or even much of a challenge. And if the enemies weren’t enough to eliminate as it is, there’s bullet time. Fore each enemy you kill, and each moment you evade fire (which in truth is not all that hard – there’s so many conveniently placed boxes and barrels.) you build up a meter that lies underneath your health bar. Simply tap ‘[]’ and leap forwards whilst everything slows down, Matrix-style. You stay in slow-motion until you reach the ground, giving you chance to let off a good two or three rounds before your enemy has even had chance to fire once. Seriously, if game ratings were based on their difficulty, and not their adult content, this would get a 3+ for sure.
As a result, the game is far, far too short – I had ‘Master Cop Mode’ (the hardest mode in the game) beaten in less than three-quarters of an hour. There simply aren’t enough levels to keep you going for longer than that, and all they all carry much the same level of difficulty, with only the final level posing some sort of challenge. There’s absolutely zero replay value, in the single player mode. That is, of course, unless you consider the gaming equivalent of landing face-first into a pile of stinging nettles as ‘fun’. The levels are incredibly repetitive, and once you’ve beaten the game there are no real unlockables or extra modes worth celebrating about.
But let’s focus on the good aspect – the graphics! They’re nice and sharp with some lovely textures and effects. It’s one of the better looking PSP games, and you could easily be fooled into thinking that it was a direct PS2 port (graphically) than a PSP dedicated game. But it’s not all good news. Let’s just say it’s ironic how the one good thing about Dead To Rights gives me another reason to slag it off. Whilst the graphics are great, they’re too great for the PSP. See, there’s this stuff called RAM (temporary memory) in the PSP, and Dead to Rights eats it up like a fat guy with a tin of Celebrations. If the game has more than about five enemies on the screen at any one time, Dead to Rights chugs along at what cannot be any more than ten frames per second. It really ruins the one aspect that could’ve saved Dead to Rights from gaming hell.
As well as using fire-arms to attack the incredibly stupid enemies (seriously, did Namco forget the AI code or something?) the game ‘boasts’ being able to call upon your dog who will force your foe to the ground and go all savage on him. Though, with the enemies flinching every time you shoot, you can just stand there and hold down ‘X’ until they give up the ghost and die, leaving absolutely no need for the crazy mutt – I beat all of the game’s three difficulty modes (first time through and in about an hour and a half, might I add) without the need to use him at all. I only used him when messing about on one of the levels with all the crazy cheats enabled.
The controls are just about tolerable – they could count as a positive aspect of the game. You move your character using the analogue slider, which is the most poorly designed aspect of the PSP hardware. Changing weapons is a slight inconvenience thanks to being assigned to the left/right directional buttons. You’ll have to take your finger away from the slider to do so causing a lapse in your movement leaving you open and venerable to attack. It’s luckily compensated by the well laid out control scheme on the right hand side of the system. ‘R’ locks on to an enemy or object, ‘x’ fires your weapon and ‘[]’ causes you character to leap forward
There’s also a LAN multiplayer mode (with extra characters available as unlockables in the one player campaign) with the same awful controls, poor excuse for a lock-on system and dull gameplay. If you want to put someone to sleep, play them in Dead to Rights. Don’t use hypnosis, or drug them up, this does the trick better than that. Our tests prove it.
If you make the mistake of buying this game, don’t put it into your PSP. I’m sure since I played this game my PSP has died a little inside. So whatever you do, never actually pay money for this pitiful effort from Namco. Whilst the game looks nice (here’s hoping GTA looks as good), and the graphical effects are cool the dull, repetitive and insanely easy gameplay, make for one of the worst PSP games I’ve played.
Reviewed by Tom McShane