NARC is well worth owning for the price. It is good fun overall.
In NARC you play as two Narcotic Officers, Jack Forzenski and Marcus Hill, and they basic premise is that a new drug called Liquid Soul is out on the streets and you as both Marcus and Jack have to find out where this drug is coming from and ultimately, put it out of commission.
During the game, you cannot choose who to be you have be either Marcus Jack depending what mission you are trying to do. They both are exactly same, gameplay-wise and they are only different by appearance.
So what does NARC play like and is it any fun? Yes, it is. It plays like an on-foot version of Grand Theft Auto III with the whole good-cop, bad-cop mechanic stapled on at the end. So this good-cop, bad-cop isn’t too taxing. You will have Badge Rating system on the top left-hand corner and on it is a number ranging from 100, all the way down to absolutely zilch. If it 100-49 you are apart the NARC squad and you can take part in missions which I will talk about in a minute. From 49-24 you will be a regular street cop and you will have to get your badge rating back up to at least 70 to be back in the NARC squad. From 24-0 you will be jobless and you will have to do quite a lot to get back onto the NARC squad again. To lose badge rating points you will have to do things like shoot unarmed criminals, kill innocents, use drugs, sell drugs and so forth. To get your badge rating back up again, you will have to arrest bad guys, deposit drugs into the deposit box outside of the police station and generally do good things.
The missions in NARC consist of pretty standards tasks such as arresting drug dealers and interrogating them about the new drug, listening to conversations, taking out snipers, protecting someone from oncoming waves of thugs and so on. The missions are quite fun and they are well put together.
The hand-to-hand combat in this game is pretty good. You can punch and kick, like you would expect, but you can do things like throwing them and you can pull of a super bust which is indicated by a meter on in the bottom left-hand corner. When it is full, you can hit X and A together to pull off a cool move which instantly arrest out your suspect. To arrest normally, you have you grapple a dude, then hit the Y button like crazy and then hit A in the sweet spot down below your character. Some people mightn’t like the button bashing and button-timing because can of feel absurd but I thought it was a pretty good way of putting arrests into the game and not just a simple case of hitting X and a enemy or something.
The gunplay is well done but it is a bit easy. You target automatically locks-on to perpetrator and you can just well… shoot him. The crosshair doesn’t lock –on to innocents either so this can make spotting foes quickly. But gunplay is fine overall.
One of the big selling points of NARC is drug taking. There are plenty of different types of real-world drugs in here such as weed, LSD, speed, crack, ecstasy, Quaaludes and the fictional drug Liquid Soul, the new drug out on the streets. All of the drugs have a short-term effect which can help you. For example, LSD helps spot bad guys easier because innocents have big jester heads while on the other hand; bad guys have big devil heads. But everytime you take a drug you are risking your character from getting addicted. When you are addicted, a new bar will appear on the heads-up-display and it is slowly getting full you can knock it down by taking the same drug again or you can take protodone which will get rid of the drug altogether but it does come at a price. When bar does hit the top, you will go through withdrawal and you will have you keep an arrow in the green part of the meter below your character. If it goes into the red, your character will blackout, be randomly be put somewhere else in the city and you will be stripped of your inventory. If you do fight it though and succeed, you will be off the drug and you will be back top normal. All of this stuff is quite gimmicky but you will have to keep it in mind while you are playing the game.
On terms of graphics, the game looks shoddy. Not only the game is blocky and dull looking but there are loads of glitches and bugs in here. Sometimes character models will disappear and reappear again, people will just appear out of nowhere and to top it all off the collision-detection isn’t to great. The dated look is because the game uses the State of Emergency engine which first came in 2001. State of Emergency was a game all about rioting and it had lots of people on screen at once. NARC also accomplishes this but you come across a bit of slowdown here and there.
The sound is a good bit better than the graphics overall. The gun shots sounds quite powerful, there is nice sense of atmosphere on the streets and everything is done pretty well. The voice-acting is excellent with Hollywood actors Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs) , Bill Bellamy (Any Given Sunday), Ron Perlman (Hellboy) and Michael Wincott (Treasure Planet) all take part in this game and they are all great. The voice-acting for the Asian people is a bit “off” and sometimes the same bit of dialogue will loop over and over again. There is also licensed music soundtrack from artists from The Happy Mondays to DMX. All of the tracks are all drug-themed so don’t be surprised if you here Curtis Mayfield’s Pusherman in there.
In terms of value, NARC should keep you going for long enough. The missions are fun and you can just have fun in the city. You can also try to find the secret drug stashes in both the USA and Asia. It is worth mentioning that if you find all 25 stashes in the USA you unlock the old NARC from 1988. It is a lot of fun and sure it is the game that made Midway Arcade Treasures 2 any fun whatsoever. If you like the sound of it, check it out.