Dated, but still pretty fun especially if you're a John Woo fan or you like Max Payne, Stranglehold or even Wet.
I am a MASSIVE fan of John Woo, and I search for any game inspired by him. I loved Max Payne, Stranglehold, Wet, and even Dead To Rights: Reckoning on the PSP. Well, thankfully, this is better than the PSP Dead To Rights, but it just feels a bit dated and doesn't hold up as well today.
I usually start with graphics, so here we go.
It's difficult to say, because Dead To Rights is quite old. They aren't hugely ugly or anything. They feel like they would've held up back in the day. Never did I look at something in disgust or agony. They are... solid.
I didn't pay much attention to the story, but for a game like this you rarely need to. Something about his Dad dying, some kind of cover up, I don't know.
It didn't matter, because where Dead To Rights really shines is the gameplay.
It actually didn't borrow as much from Max Payne as you'd expect.
The slow-mo diving works and feels different, as do the shooting mechanics.
As the gamespot review says, heaps of guys pour into a room, and you shoot them often really brutally, but always stylishly. Does that sound familiar to you Woo fans? Yes, big adrenaline rush.
All the guns feel huge and meaty but the shotgun would have to be my favorite. Massive sound and massive kick. The bad guys just explode in cartoonish blood and fly backward. BOOM and he's gone.
When guns are nowhere to be seen, you switch to martial-arts. This mechanic doesn't work as well as the gunplay, but it breaks up the gameplay quite nicely and there aren't much scenarios where you're forced into hand-to hand combat. And then there's a bunch of mini games to help break things up too, such as bomb-defusing, weight lifting and arm wrestling.
The biggest gripe I had with this was some of the environments. They just feel a bit empty, and this fact is highlighted because Jack Slate can run quite slowly for a super cop. Then when you think you're going the right way BAM there's an invisible wall! Oh yay, I can backtrack all the way back to where I was so I can slowly run somewhere else.
This does hinder the games fun factor quite a bit. That's really the only problem I have with this, although it is a big problem in my books.
Not much more to write. If you like ANY of the games I mentioned then you will like this. It's a rare find, but buy it if you see it.
A fun game from last generation.