An unoriginal game that attempts to ride on its license and coasts right into the realm of mediocrity.
For a bit of cultural reference, the game was made as a tie-in with the live-action film released at about the same time, which was in turn based on an old comic/cartoon character that was popular in the first half of the twentieth century. Simply put, the subject matter of this game bore no resonance with the age group commonly associated with playing Nintendo games at the time.
The game's structure bears some strong similarities to the original NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game. The player, controlling Dick, drives around the streets of the city in an extreme overhead view in his car, occasionally getting out to shoot at the multitude of snipers that line the streets before entering buildings to look for evidence. At this point, the game switches to a sidescrolling view in which Dick runs around, using guns and various power-ups like a super punch to take out hordes of generic gangsters until he locates the little flashing box that indicates where the evidence is. This process needs to be repeated another four times, at which point the player can locate and arrest the proper criminal from the rogue's gallery of Dick Tracy villains, which are typically characterized by some sort of physical malformity (ex: Prune Face and Flat Top). Once the proper arrest is made, the game then moves onto the next case, and the whole process is repeated from scratch.
The only activity that breaks up this monotony is the occasional car chase, which involves Dick jumping in his car after leaving a building and giving chase to a car escaping the scene. After hitting the enemy car with about twenty bullets, the car will stop, and Dick will take the driver in for questioning to yield one of those oh-so-vital pieces of evidence.
If there's anything positive that can be said about Dick Tracy, it's that the game isn't utterly broken. The look of the game is clean and playable, but it's not particularly distinguished, and as said before, the world of Dick Tracy just doesn't ring bells for a generation that grew up with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Robotech, and Jem and the Holograms.
That said, the game still isn't that original, as a lot of the gameplay, such as the overhead city segments and the interior sidescrolling, were both done before, and done better in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. At the very least, the Turtle Van could fire missiles, and there was more to the gameplay than running from building to building looking for blinking evidence icons and shooting more snipers than you'd find in playing Counter-Strike for three hours.
Dick Tracy is just another mediocre movie-licensed mess. There have certainly been worse games on the NES, but Dick Tracy's worst offenses spawn from the fact that the game not only feels like a direct rip-off of a distinctively better game, it just coasts along on its license, which its target audience hardly gave a damn about in the first place. If you find this game buried in the discount bin at your local game shop, leave it alone. It's not worth the effort of dusting out your NES.