SHOOT. THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD.
A Review of Drug Wars
Michael Allen
There used to be a television show called something like
"To Shoot or Not To Shoot", on during the filler-time of
Sunday afternoons without football. The show presented some of the
training that police officers go through. One aspect of this education
that lent itself well to television was a special room
where a film of a made-up crime scene was shown to the trainees, and
they had to decide whether to shoot or not to shoot the person they
were "interacting" with. For instance, in one scene an irate woman in
a bathrobe walks towards the camera, verbally abusing the poor
trainee. For a split second, her hand sweeps from behind her back and
you can see that she holds a gun. If the trainee did not spot this,
the woman would shoot him without provocation several seconds later.
Drug Wars is not quite as clever as this.
This third-rate shoot 'em up puts the player in the point-of-view of an officer presumably in the DEA, though what denomination of official the player is is never fully expounded upon. It's main distinguishment from the "Lethal Enforcers" arcade game is that Drug Wars gives the player about 450 megs of compressed live action video to shoot at. Basically your task is to go through different scenarios, blasting as many bad guys as you can without shooting civilians or your partner. Using the mouse, you have about a quarter of a second to click on a bad guy before he or she blows you away, which usually results in a sarcastic remark from your not-so-understanding partner. "Hey, you're dead! Isn't that bad?" is one of the more clever ones.
Drug Wars has many problems, not the least of which is that
the setup program failed to correctly configure for my SB 32 AWE, and
that the game crashed and had video problems frequently. The
compressed movies are quite blocky, even for VGA standards. This
can not only make the game unpleasant to look at, but if something
small happens (like your stereotypical evil Colombian gun-toting drug
dealer popping out from behind some well-placed explosive barrels fifty
feet away which only seem to be set off by bullets after he dies), chances are
your eye will miss it.
Beyond technical difficulties, the game play is, to the say the least, repetitive. The scenarios, besides general scenery, have little to distinguish one from another. Also, at times it is infuriatingly hard to shoot a bad guy. The game gives the player about a quarter of second to recognize that a bad guy has stood up way in the background before your character becomes intimately familiar with the city morgue. You practically have to know that this bad guy will pop up at this point, at this time, in order to be able to move on. The fact that you can save the game mid-level, however, makes this process easy to the point of being stupidly simple minded. Not usually a fan of, or particularly good at, action games, I finished this one in less than two hours on the easiest setting. There is little to entice me back to playing the harder difficulty levels, and any dedicated action fan will be quickly bored.
The plot, what there is of it, is laughable, and the so-called
characters even more so. The fact that full-motion video is employed
raised my expectations upon seeing the CD, but these were quickly cut
down in a barrage of cliches and mindless action. For something that
is supposed to "look real", the cops in this game act like anything but.
Drug Wars has a couple of small things going for it. The save game feature is handy, despite how easy it makes winning the game. There are some inventive shooting sequences where the camera swoops, turns, and dives with the POV of our hero, trying to see where the next bad guy will be coming from. The production values are above average, with actual bus crashes, piles of extras, and car and boat and building explosions which were made, as far as I can tell, explicitly for this game. But none of these pluses make up for the utter lack of originality and creativity that plagues Drug Wars.
Gamer's Zone Scorecard
| Product: |
Drug Wars |
| Company: |
American Laser Games
|
| Cost: |
n/a |
System Requirements:
n/a
Breakdown:
Fun Factor 2
Graphics 1
Sound 1
Interface 2
Replayability 1
Overall Score:
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