Dead To Rights

Dead to Rights has a lot more built-in diversity in gameplay than Max Payne does. The character can fight unarmed, have his sidekick dog attack enemies, disarm enemies and steal their guns, and hide against walls and kill people stealthily. That's not to mention the plethora of minigames, which take most of their gameplay from the venerable Track and Field series of button-mashing to some specified parameters.

DTR doesn't have half the atmosphere that Max Payne does, and that's largely due to the art direction and cinematography, rather than anything else. A lot of the cutscenes are done in-engine, and while DTR's not ugly, it's not pretty, either. Visually, it's about half-way between Halo and a Dreamcast game.

The most important thing to consider, however, when trying to decide whether to purchase DTR, is that it's staggeringly difficult. The biggest problem with DTR is that the difficulty comes not from a legitimate, skill-based challenge, but from a lousy camera, and poor auto-targetting.

At times, you will dive at a person with a shotgun, who is standing not far in front of you. You might be armed with a shotgun as well, so range would be an important consideration, since you'll do more damage to something closer to you. But rather than targetting the guy in front of you, where one hit would kill him, you end up targetting someone off-camera, to your left, who's behind a truck. Of course, after flying through the air like an idiot, you land at this guy's feet, where he kills you with one close-range shotgun blast.

The problem with DTR is that it's so full of potential, and so full of neat ideas, and they're mired in this half-baked mess, where you can't DO any of the things that you *want* to do.

It's a neat game, on paper - full of potential, full of excellent ideas. But as it stands, it's frustrating not because of a legitimate challenge, but because every couple of minutes, you'll be killed by something you couldn't possibly avoid.

First off, disarms are way too cool. There are nearly twenty to unlock. I figure I'll have to play all the way through the game at least three times to get them all. Right up there with disarms is taking hostages to use as human shields. This is very nearly a necessity in every gunfight-the AI has pretty good aim. You can use all the weapons your enemies can-many different pistols, shotguns, and rifles. In addition, you have an attack dog. He's an instant kill, plus he'll retrieve the weapon from the enemy he just tore up. The storyline is well-crafted for this genre. Certainly no surprises, but it is engaging.

The in-game graphics are nowhere near what the XBox is capable of. It looks like a PS2 game. Don't get me wrong-it's playable, but not top-caliber. In many cases, speaking characters' mouths don't move during cutscenes. The camera controls are only occasionally frustrating. The controls for gunfights are good. You're forced to auto-aim a great deal, but the auto-aim controls are responsive. The hand-to-hand combat controls are, frankly, awful. There is virtually no finesse involved, and long sections of hand-to-hand become button-mashfests only slightly below the mini-game sequences. By the way, the first minigame is awful beyond the telling of it.

If you are easily frustrated, this is not the game for you, though I'd still suggest renting it. All in all, I enjoy this game. It's worth the money if you enjoy a big challenge, and if you can overlook the game's annoyances.