People can be pretty forgiving about budget titles, which is expected, as it is common to expect lesser quality for a cheaper price. However, is that really the case these days? There are some quality titles released at a budget MSRP in North America. Take Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution and Phantom Dust, for instance. One’s a PlayStation 2 title and the other’s an Xbox title, proving it’s not a phenomenon that’s limited to one platform. For smaller companies, a budget title is a daring way to get their name out; in some cases, this is true for larger companies as well, take the 2K line, with its main benefit being an increased user-base that made EA take notice.
When a larger company announces a budget title, the excitement is also met with a little trepidation. The excitement comes from picking up titles that may be great, like Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution or Phantom Dust, but the trepidation comes from picking up a title like NARC. NARC, in all its aged and sketchy glory, sucks. It’s a buggy, poorly executed title that takes what promise it has and pummels it into the ground with faux attitude and boring gameplay.
To be sure, NARC does have some promising aspects. The thrill of chasing down a drug dealer and slamming him to the pavement by way of a leap of faith, then beating him into submission before slapping the cuffs on, is present. Criminals can have their weapons wrestled from them, they can be ‘softened up’ during the arrest process to make taking them in easier, and even cuffing involves a bit of exercise, albeit a pointless one, as you’re asked to tap a button and time the action of slapping the cuffs on with a moving gauge. While the latter is a bit tedious, it at least is an attempt at something somewhat new. The arsenal is also packed with machine guns, sniper rifles, dual pistols, shotguns, and even a flamethrower. There is even one escort mission that could’ve been great, with Marcus (Bill Bellamy) riding on the back of a van and protecting it from ambushes, which is a rarity.
To get any of this, though, you have to trudge through a game that feels unfinished at best, and, at worst, like a failure. Starting off as Jack Forzenski (Michael Madsen), you are the proverbial loose cannon. You had gone over the edge into a nasty drug habit, which you have since kicked. However, in a plotline that sounds like it was pulled from the movie NARC, your old partner Marcus Hill doesn’t trust you and the ever-present drug dealers mean you can get your fix at any time. Nevertheless, the two are forced to work together to rid the streets of a new drug called Liquid Soul. Throughout the game, you have to face your demons. Shown through flashbacks, and the game itself if and when you become addicted, your drug addiction is shown as a somewhat paranormal and painful process of hallucinations and agony. The problem with this is that the CG is extremely poor. Everything looks as if it is being stretched vertically and the quality is something from the late 90s. Whatever dramatics that they were going for pretty much hit a brick wall. The in-game dialogue that is supposed to be hip and witty also falls flat with the game going too far over the edge and being just silly. The voice acting is decent, but the script is poor, rife with such gems as “They all…DIED.”
The game allows you to also roam the city streets and kick around drug dealers, muggers, and even those hellacious fiends, the graffiti artists and preachers. By arresting people and disposing of the drugs and cash taken off their persons at the local police station, you earn reputation points. These points are important because falling below the halfway mark gets you busted down to a beat cop, which doesn’t allow you to access any of the missions. This requires you to get your rating back up to 70, because you’re essentially jobless at any point lower than that, though the ultimate low triggers when the game spawns cops to come after you. Getting busted down to beat cop is a real incentive to not mess around because that is particularly boring. The game is supposed to let you struggle with people and wrestle them around, but the result tends to be them tossing you around and you eventually beating them to death, whether you wanted to or not. Or, if you like, you could be intentionally bad. In one sanctioned mission, you are told to sell drugs to get cash to prove yourself to some crooked cops. How do you sell drugs? Subtleness be damned: “Want to buy some shit?” Yes, that’s right. You just walk up to people, flip out whatever you have, and ask them if they want it. Oddly enough, it’s always the same models who want anything. One humorous side effect to this, and of the game using the aging State of Emergency engine, is that the cities only have a handful of character models. After you sell drugs, everyone who’s not interested looks at you with a ‘”oh, no!” animation, even if you aren’t selling anything to them. This means that if you go into a back alley with 10-15 people, all of the same three character models will do the “oh, no!” animation, which is them doing a slide of sorts and putting their hand over their mouths, which resembles a scene from Thriller. Good times.
In another nod to subtlety, it can be difficult to keep your reputation points high when the game gives you a rocket launcher with which to kill a sniper, not to mention the civilians who spawn around and run in the middle of firefights.
The big feature of NARC is drug use. I suppose the developers were making a statement, because narcotic usage is absolutely useless in the game. The drugs are supposed to have different effects, and they do, but they are so minimal that it barely registers. Most of it just consists of bright colors flashing on the border of the screen and the view wobbling. Messing around with everything takes about five minutes, but it’s somewhat enjoyable to drop some acid and see people walk around in mascot outfits and hear warped carnival music. The controls, which are already sporadic as it is, are made so bad when you’re on anything that it negates any benefits they might have, such as slowing down time, seeing farther ahead, and so on. Taking too much of anything, including the one bottle of liquor I had, can cause you to become addicted. Addiction can be fought off by taking more of the drug, but eventually the problem will have to be faced, and that is going through withdrawals, which involves the view and force feedback going nuts and you having to time a sequence of button pressings. If you fail to kick the habit three times, the game does it for you. Using too much can also cause you to black out and lose everything, so be careful when you’re shooting up!
The controls, aside from the timing and button mashing sequences, can be a hassle. There is an auto aim function that goes completely nuts when running, causing the target to flick around and just be distracting, but it can also make bullets magical, causing bad guys to get hit when the reticle wasn’t even on them. Item selection is also a pain, with up and down on the directional pad picking from items and weapons. The real hassle comes when you realize that the game doesn’t discard weapons that are out of ammo, and that it takes a second for the ammo count to come up. This means that, in the middle of a firefight, you’re flipping through weapons that could be empty, leaving you to scroll through, waiting for something with ammo to pop up.
Traversing the cities brings about the best of the game: the soundtrack. Each district has a different track associated with it, and some of it is just flat-out good stuff. While the music won’t keep you from noticing that there are five cars at most in an entire city and that that guy you just passed looks like he is peeing on a median, it will make you forgot that you aren’t having all that much fun. Since there are no vehicles in the game, missions (regular and special – special being things like hunting snipers or taking out hostage takers before SWAT goes in) are gathered through the story and at the police station, and the locations have to be ran to. To be sure, there are plenty of generic rap songs that are used throughout the game; however, these tend to be made just for the game, while the licensed music helps to really set the mood. There are some acts that are more contemporary that fit the game well, like Cypress Hill and DMX, but then you’ll hear the one and only Curtis Mayfield come on with ‘Pusherman’, and a few minutes later ‘White Lines’ may come on. With acts like Mayfield and Skynyrd on here, the rock and funk medicine is strong, almost strong enough to make you keep playing.
While the soundtrack succeeds in setting the mood of the game, the graphics fail. Using a dated engine, citizens are all of a limited type and spawn throughout the city to do things like bump into each other, get stuck between a curb and the street, and randomly set stuff on fire. The game is also dark. It seems to always be nighttime – to be edgy, I suppose – but all that succeeds in doing is making navigation difficult, with ledges being missed frequently because you can’t even tell there was nothing there to be on top of. There are also glitches, polygon seams, and some slowdown.
One annoying thing I found is that the game handles restarting in a weird way. Failing a mission because of low health and restarting to get a full bar is nice, and the design seems to rely on this, but you also start over with bullet holes in the spot you shot at before you died and the ammo that you used before you died is depleted. Having to replay an escort (ugh) situation is never fun when all your best weapons are out.
Even at $20, NARC just doesn’t satisfy. Its length is decent, since there is the original that can be unlocked as well, but it is way too easy. The only real difficulty in the game is due its technical follies and the random ‘I see the spot on the map… I’m there… but the spot isn’t here’ moments.
Overall: 3/10
At this point in the lifecycle of the various systems, even a $20 game has to deliver. For those wanting gunplay, there is Max Payne. For those who want pretty much what NARC really wants to offer, but sans the novelty drug aspect and the ability to drive around larger, more populated cities, there is True Crime: Streets of L.A., which even has the good cop/bad cop feature. Both of these games can be had for less than NARC’s MSRP. This game offers brief moments of non-mediocrity, which hinted that it had a direction and a goal at some point, but the end product is just a mess. There’s better stuff out there, even for $20.
