NARC is an inherently dark game, and the graphics attempt to convey this feeling by placing the game in a perpetual night time city, complete with dark alleys, tall buildings, and unsavory looking people. The unsavory bit isn’t so much a result of style, but more because of deformities and glitches. There is little variety amongst the models of pedestrians, giving the streets a kind of clone world feeling. The animations of these doppelgangers aren’t that great either as people clip, bounce, and warp all over the place. You can use drugs to alter your view of the world, resulting in some interesting effects, and you’ll probably find yourself doing this a lot in order to break up the monotonous drivel that you’ll come in contact with.

Midway wanted to make a Hollywood production with NARC. Unfortunately they succeeded, meaning that most of the resources were funneled into acquiring top voice and music talent, such as Michael Madsen and Ron Perlman. Midway seems to have been so infatuated by actors’ voices that they forgot they needed decent sound effects to round out the experience. Gunshots, fist fights, and generally everything else that you hear is low quality, muted, and generally lacking in timing. Beating the crap out of somebody sounds more like you’re swatting a fly, and most gun effects are indistinguishable from one another. But hey, at least DMX is on the soundtrack.

NARC is not a remake of the classic arcade game. Those who were fans of the game that spent all their quarters probably won’t be too happy when they see what’s been done to a once great name. This go around, NARC is a 3D action game as opposed to a level-based 2D side-scroller. NARC also focuses on the use of drugs to help out your gameplay. These drugs affect the world around you in various ways, such as making you faster, slowing everyone else down, or making you able to differentiate between the bad guys and the good guys on the street. For all its effort, the narcotic effects lose their luster after the first couple of uses, and its functionality isn’t all that necessary to play the game.

Since you are a Narcotics officer, you must obey the law... to an extent. Using the drugs may help you, but every now and then you have to go to the precinct for a drug test. The more drugs you have used, the harder it is to pass the test. You can also become addicted to any one drug if you use too much of it, and if this happens you go into withdrawals if you don’t get your fix. What this means is that everything stops and you keel over, your only chance of survival being a little floating arrow that you must maintain within a certain boundary for a minute or two. Yet another interesting gimmick with the drugs that eventually wears on your patience instead of entertaining you.

Since you have all of these vices at your fingertips, there are some negative consequences to dabbling in them all. If you do a lot of drugs, beat up innocent people, or sell drugs to passersby, your reputation goes down. If it hits a certain level, you get busted down to beat cop. This effectively stops the main flow of the game and makes you do a bunch of good deeds, like busting criminals or helping people who are getting mugged, until your rep goes back up to an acceptable level. At this point, you can continue the game as normal.

What I call the main flow of the game isn’t so much a “flow” as it is a bumpy ride inside a drug-induced rat maze. You are faced with a number of linear missions which usually have you running from one side of the city to another to catch some guy who will invariably turn out to have a gun, in which case you have to either kill him or grab and arrest him.

Other missions involve trailing people, stealth tactics, or generally going around and busting drug pushers. All the missions become tedious, monotonous, and downright boring after a while. Even though you switch between two main characters throughout the game, their only differences are the voices of the actors and a couple of guns they start out with. The rest is just fluff that is used to drive the incredibly thin storyline which comprises of narcotics officers trying to find the source of a new drug. The twists along the way are predictable and dull, leaving what was supposed to be a Hollywood influenced action game about drugs less entertaining than watching an episode of “Cops.”

NARC is not the hardest game out there. Difficulties arise in the controls and the interpretation of some mission briefings, but in the end, the challenge inherent in the game is a hollow one. Navigating around the city is hindered by the absence of any large-scale map. Instead, you have to follow icons on a mini map in the upper right hand corner of the screen, an annoyance that could have easily been averted. Shooting is easy due to the automatic lock-on system, and bagging crooks is simply a matter of button mashing and then precision timing. NARC is more like a series of troublesome hurdles that must be overcome rather than a set of interesting challenges.

NARC doesn’t get much more complicated than your average run-and-gun shooter. There are a variety of weapons that become available to your disposal: sniper rifles, pistols, grenade launchers, etc. While shooting your way through the game can alleviate the boredom a bit, you eventually have to unleash a powerful arsenal of kicks and blows on drug dealers in order to take them down. This use of non-lethal force usually culminates in you arresting the perp, which is done by first grappling them, then smashing the Triangle button, and then timing a meter to land in a certain area. Do all this and you’ll slap the cuffs on the baddie and all will be well.

This is the only relevant mechanic in the game. NARC employs many little features just because it can, all of which don’t really have any positive effect. For instance, you can shimmy along poles in order to reach locations that don’t have any walkways leading to them. Since there is only one path to each destination, forcing you to use this incredibly slow method of transportation is wasted effort. Had you been able to shimmy past guards in order to avert violence, it would have been one thing. However, shimmying, along with various forms of diving around the place, are practically useless and just serve to make the experience that much worse.

NARC was meant to be an entertaining experience in the same vein as watching a movie. What ends up coming out of the oven is a Hollywood-injected fiasco that makes all the same mistakes as similar games that have failed before it. A bad plot mixed with boring gameplay and sprinkled with a star studded cast is a recipe for disaster in the game industry. With tripe like NARC continuously pouring forth from the factories, it makes you wonder when anyone is going to catch on to these blatant mistakes and try to make a difference.