Henchman pop quiz
You see a policeman, singlehandedly, take down 20 gang members and now he is taking down the rest of your gang, what do you do?
a) Take cover and shoot at him.
b) Run at him swinging your fists.
If you answered a) than you are over thinking this and are over qualified for the job.
I have been racking my brains trying to put my finger on what is wrong with this game and I think the answer is Steven Seagal. All bloody violence but no brain.
Dead NO Rights
Jack the hero of the game delivers a big sermon on the value of human life then sends his dog to kill everybody in the building. When that is done, Jack moves in and kills another building full of people. After the killing, SWAT shows up and shoots one guy. One guy.
Jacky boy complains loudly to SWAT: “We don’t just kill people, we arrest them and talk to them”. Whatever. I don’t think he has ever arrested anybody in his live. I don’t think they even have jails in Grant City, the only punishment they have is DEATH. Drug dealer? DEATH. Library books late? DEATH.
Then again, games hardly ever have a story more complicated than kill everything that moves. Without worrying too much about the storyline, what is it like to play the game?
Gameplay
Let’s see, there is the cover system from Gears of War, the combat and sneaking from Batman, the bullet-time of Max Payne and Woofles the watchdog from Pumpkin Patch.
Now let us take a look at their cover system. It is not as intuitive as the system used in Gears of War. When you hit the “take cover” button in Gears, they take cover. When you hit the “take cover: button in in DTR, Jack stubbornly stands still and absorbs bullets. You need to guide Jack close to a wall, then make him face the wall, then and only then will he take cover.
Leaning out from cover to shoot is also flawed. Sometimes Jack can’t shoot from where he is standing or you can’t see where he is shooting because the camera is pointing right at his freakin’ head.
In an attempt to make melee action more intelligent, and not just a button masher, they introduced combos. Three pages of different combos. Who is going to memorize all that? To make matters worse the game introduces other types of fighting techniques while you are busy fighting. Suddenly something like “To disarm a thug press …” would flash briefly on screen and disappear again. I am sorry I did not quite get that, I was being shot in the face.
During all of this don’t forget about the bullet-time, and of controlling Woofles.
In the humble opinion of this slightly-over-weight-booze-addicted-computer-geek, they should have lost the gun-fights altogether, and focused on polishing the dog sidekick and Batman style hand-to-hand battles.
So what’s there to like?
The city is spectacular. The surroundings and the atmosphere is expertly done, you can see that a lot of time and effort went into creating the game world.
The animation is also brilliant. The kung-fu moves that some enemies pull during hand-to-hand combat looks amazing. Sometimes it looks like Bruce Lee himself is giving you a beat down.
But pretty pictures don’t make a great game; kickass gameplay makes a great game, and this is where DTR is lacking.
Some people might like the over top brutal violence and there is the opportunity to play as Shadow the killer dog which is a novel experience but other than that, there is no real reason why you would want to play this.
Reviewed on Xbox 360
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