Dual Threat Review

Dual Threat, Airborne Entertainment's new mobile side-scroller, kicks off with a story straight out of an early-'80s Walter Hill movie--it's Philadelphia, 1982. The city is in the grips of an oppressive heat wave, and a crime syndicate called The Duce is running the city. It's up to a mismatched pair of cops, one of whom has recently been stripped of his badge, to bring down this criminal empire. This enjoyably prototypical plot, though, is by far the best thing that this short, repetitive, and poorly produced side-scrolling shooter has to offer.

Before the summer is over, The Duce will know the real meaning of heat.

The title refers to the fact that you'll play through the game as both of the buddy cops over the course of the game--there's Bobby Archer, described as "a third-generation cop who goes by the rules," and Marcus "Boom-Boom" Brown, a loose cannon who plays by his own rules and is a danger to himself and those around him. Despite their divergent personalities, the two have nearly identical capabilities. Over the course of the game's two levels, you'll punch and shoot three different types of enemies, leap over gaps and land mines, and evade enemies by shimmying along elevated bars and creeping through ventilation shafts. At the beginning of each level, you're presented with a list of stats--strength, weapons, stamina, and stealth--which dictate how well you'll perform the different tasks at hand. You're given the option to invest some extra points into your stats as you see fit, though considering how much more effective guns are than stealth or hand-to-hand combat, and the seemingly random amount of health that can be lost to enemy fire, we found dumping all our points into weapons and stamina to be the most effective tactic.

Though you'll play through the two levels as both Archer and Boom-Boom, each with a different objective, the levels aren't particularly long, nor are they exceedingly difficult, thanks to an abundance of health pickups. The abrupt ending, which does little to wrap up the well-conceived story intro, gives the feeling that the developer initially intended to include many more levels. The gameplay concepts presented in Dual Threat are all totally legitimate, but the problem is that the game executes on those ideas terribly. General movement feels stifled, and jumping in particular is incredibly poor, making the tasks of jumping over land mines and leaping across gaps--activities that come up fairly often--rather cumbersome. The shooting mechanic literally seems hit and miss, and there was more than one occasion when we ran into an enemy that was, for all intents and purposes, invincible. Dual Threat is a game where the difficulty is derived from design flaws rather than a legitimate challenge, which always ends in frustration. We played through Dual Threat on both an LG VX6000 and a Nokia Series 60 phone, and though the Series 60 version ran at a much less lethargic pace, the actual gameplay was identical, and all of the functional issues remained intact.

The game's visuals don't compensate much for the dodgy gameplay, either. Character animation is extremely choppy, and the characters themselves look kind of awkward. The backgrounds, which include some rather bland warehouse and back-alley motifs, recycle different art elements quite liberally. Both the LG VX6000 and the Nokia Series 60 versions of Dual Threat are devoid of any sound whatsoever--no menu music, no in-game effects, nothing. Even a simple little funk ditty would have gone far to add some personality to the whole affair, but there is none to be found here.

Dual Threat is a poor implementation of a decent, if not well-worn, idea. The text-based story goes a long way toward cementing the game's feel, but shoddy, inconsistent controls, repetitive gameplay, and an underwhelming amount of playtime completely negate any charm Dual Threat might have had.