If you want carpal tunnel syndrome at age 28 with good visuals and audio qualities, then this is your game.
Yet there are some games in the genre that manage to be original, exciting and fun without being pretentious and irritating. For the longest time, I couldn't figure out if there were any such third-person action/shooter games that fit this category of fun without being lame excuses for fictional brainless twits to go around killing crowds of baddies in ways that make your eyes roll. Which led me to the dated and understandably forgotten title Dead To Rights, brought to us by the people of Namco.
In Dead to Rights, you play as Grant City police K9 officer Jack Slate accompanied by his faithful part-wolf dog Shadow (both possessing the names of 'cool' action heroes) whom of which the former finds himself encountering hostile construction workers one night who apparently have killed his father. Jack follows what leads he can up to discovering who killed his father and why, whilst being framed for murder and marked for death along the way.
Like most crafty game developers, the opening scene was filled with impressive opening graphics that apparently has no real connection to the story whereas the graphics in the game gradually depreciate in quality as the cut scene graphics slowly go from good to okay to down right badly done. The in-game graphics share their mixed fill of shininess, detail, weather effects and blood spurts along with blocky, confusing character movements, horribly done helicopter or in some case car flipping effects and constant fist-holding-gun stances where the hands aren't wrapped around the grip of the gun. Rather, the gun is placed into the character's hands like an action figure holding it's accessories.
The developers obviously tried to make the cut scenes make you feel as though you were watching an older film noir/action thriller movie by slopping up the frames a little in certain shots to make the game almost look candid or low budget. However, instead of completing that effect, they made random parts of the main character and his dog blur and jump around for half a millisecond and keep the polygons at a lazily done perspective, so that hands go through parts of the backgrounds, heads go through shirt collars and it makes the player feel like their watching a Nintendo 64 FMV.
Obviously, the developers weren't extremely attentive about the FMV scenes because their occasional sense of continuity is very weak. There was one scene where we saw a character holding a gun, the camera changed to another character, then went back to the first mentioned character and the gun in their hand was gone, though the hand that was holding the gun was still in the gun holding position, but then the same camera changed back to a different character then back to the first person holding the gun and the gun was back in their hand. The Hell is that all about?!
Dead to Rights is a game that attempts to break new grounds of third person shooter game-play by enabling different moves. For instance, the disarming of foes through moves that you can learn while progressing through the game or through the help of your police dog are present along with the ability to use propane to explosive potential, using your enemy as a shield, assuming the roles of friends of the protagonist to help him proceed and the a few moments where you man a gun turret and have to chase others down or protect your allies while in a moving vehicle. However, the game play innovations and the controls tend to go into painful terrain in moments where you expect them the most and least.
For instance, the ability to literally dive into action, slow down time and make off sure hits against enemies is grand, but it is in no way advisable to use in every aspect of the action as it proves to be inefficient and only good as a moment of showing off in easy shoot-outs. Also whatever happened to the good old ability to climb up objects or jump over others? I mean, sure we are playing with an acrobatic policeman with military training, but we sure as Hell aren't playing with the guy from Doom. Plus, no matter what, his dives are extremely slow and are limited to only one direction.
There's also the fact that when you start out in new levels after amassing weapons in the previous level, all of your weapons mysteriously vanish. What the Hell! I was only able to use a flame-thrower near the end of one level on a total of three guys for a total time of 5 seconds before I progressed to the next level and lost EVERY weapon available, including the use of my dog. And here's the weird part: between the end of that level and transition to the next, NOTHING happened to our character that would have made him drop every weapon he had. And although our hero seems respectable when it comes to fighting unarmed guys and gals, he certainly doesn't learn how to fight as dirty as they do when they're armed and you get too close to them. I mean it's one thing fighting people who can do the same amount of moves as you do, but when you can't do what they do (knock you down and fire at you), it gets a little lame. Especially when you find yourself illogically surrounded by enemies who spawn out of no where after you clear small areas:
I found myself in one level constantly surrounded by luscious, miniskirt wearing, assault rifle totting Asian female masseuses and assassins popping up left and right after wasting at least twenty out of the fifteen that appeared, trying to desperately escape through a closed, yet unlocked door, trying to hold back the tears of killing dozens of beautiful Asian women surrounding me, not knowing where they're coming from and at the same time trying to protect an obviously made for sex appeal only character that I personally could give a crap about due to her unrealistic lack of armor and inexcusably bad weapon selection!
Thus rises another problem: the objectives aren't lucid enough for you to do exactly what you need to do in order to pass a certain portion of the level. In the scenario I described above, your given objective is to protect the stupid character you run into. In order to live through that scenario, you need to kill two assassins and this cute young blonde named Lotus, and then go for the exit. But do our objectives tell you that? Nope. Nor do they tell you how killing those three targets magically unlocks said exit, especially when it was previously unlocked at the beginning of the battle!
There are even unexplained fights that the game never mentions or warns you about earlier in games, like when you have to shoot a boss when he stands in a certain position and a red dot appears on the screen indicating where you have to stand in order to shoot him... in which none of the previous levels train you on.
And on a final note, the breaking of the action with the help of all the mini-games felt like exercises in getting carpal tunnel syndrome earlier than a gamer should with the help of button-matching mashing action measured by speed and strength (strength as in how hard you can pound the button into the controller) and with all of the antagonistic sequences that contribute to moments such as lifting weights and avoid suffocating being applied to an X-Box game where most of the buttons aren't designed for comfortable mashing, the mashing-moments feel laborious and torturous.
The sound is actually quite appropriate; It's basically what you come to expect in a game like Dead to Rights in that it proffers a lot of generic action explosions and most of the sounds are well done. I especially appreciated the sounds of fuming engines from the level six boss fight, but such scenes had their down sides. There was one scene I witnessed when a car flew off of a bridge and a helicopter followed after it, yet I didn't even hear the thudding of the car against the ground, its shocks hurting like hell, nor did I hear the chopper's blades whizzing by. That sense of continuity sort of got to the game again.
Though strikingly similar to that of Twisted Metal Black in some tones, the soundtrack takes large atmospheric/action packed steps during and not during game play. It creates the feel of a modern action thriller and pitches it towards the game. However, this musical score got a little repetitive and consequently unenjoyable as we run into the same situation with the same musical score as the previous level. Yet, it wasn't a big let down or anything of the sort, for the music did certainly fit the game rather well for every scene.
Thankfully, the voice acting for Dead to Rights is really good with only a few thugs and bit players sounding like they were voiced by actors who commonly do voices for cartoon animal characters. Occasionally, some of the characters are hard to hear as they end their line with an inexcusable mumble that was intended for dramatic tension, but such moments aren't frequent, so at least your ears will be happy.
The story works out as a good crime mystery for awhile, but for all its turn of events and unexpected back-stabbing it tends to fall into the crevice of crap near the end as the story presents dumb plot twists on a whim and you get the feeling that most made-for-TV movies from the seventies had better plot twists.
In DTR's favor, I should say that the main character isn't a total prick with less competence than a kindergarten bully and with even less tolerance than one as most action game heroes; his hardened dialogue and light-hearted, but otherwise no-jokes attitude prove he's a hero that's easy to root for which in honesty is all I can ask for in a game like Dead to Rights. He does have his moments of showing off his hubris in that he'll make stupid decisions that only get him into more trouble and he doesn't do much in character development, but once again I think I'd rather stick with a hopeless dope like Jack Slate rather than over confidant, pretentious action-loving morons like Duke Nukem, Eliot Ballade, Tom Hansen, Lara Croft (from every Tomb Raider game except the original) and what later turned out to be Leon Kennedy.
To conclude, I think in retrospect Dead to Rights has a few good things going for it between its characters, twists, good audio aspects and action, but the goodness of the game is coated in the chewy, tooth-pulling caramel layers of bad game play decisions and control schemes with the graphics falling between impressive and laughable. So if you're looking for a third person action shooter that challenges your wrists and mocks your critical intelligence for the sake of discovering what will happen next to the protagonist in his never ending predicament of finding the right bad guy, then I would highly recommend Dead to Rights. Maybe I'd still own the game if there were more pole dancing sequences, but that's just me.