Dead to Rights II: Hell to Pay
Dead on Arrival.
Published: April 27, 2005
I've played a lot of crappy games in my time. Back when I was trying to make ends meet before the turn of the century, I did more than my fair share of freelance reviews of really, really bad PlayStation games for IGN, and one of the down sides to running a PS2 site is that you can't always pass the bad games off to the rest of the staff.
This just happens to be one of those games, and if nothing else, Dead to Rights II has the dubious distinction of being the single worst game I've played in a good five years -- and I used be a PR rep for 3DO. The development team at Widescreen games completely phoned in every single aspect of this game, and the result is something that looks and plays like a tech demo, and sounds like it was coded by a bunch of high school kids working on their first game. This is the kind of game that we used to make fun of when Criterion first showed off the RenderWare platform.
For those that didn't get a chance to play through the first Dead to Rights, you missed out on the kind of storyline and action one would expect from, say, a Steven Segal flick; some fun little moments where guys get their necks snapped punctuated by long stretches of meager story and lots of bad dialogue. And then there was the part where you could play as a stripper and get your dance on as a low-poly nudie girl gyrated away to distract bad guys. This and a few other mini-games helped break up the action a bit, but for the PS2 and GameCube versions, the game's biggest source of strategy, the difficulty, was more or less stripped out.
Whereas the first game concentrated on bad boy cop Jack Slate trying to clear his name after being framed for his father's murder, the sequel (which is technically a prequel) has you tracking down a kidnapped whistle-blower that was ready to bring down the city's biggest crime syndicate and the prominent city members of hoity-toity society that were connected to it. Jack's joined once again by his trusty K-9 partner Shadow, who reprises his role as resident baddie-mauler and weapons fetcher.
When the game first game out, the inevitable comparisons to Max Payne were made, and for good reason. Jack dives in slo-mo and shoots guys. This hasn't really changed for the sequel, and luckily there's still a nice adherence to taking cover, grabbing enemies for use as a human shield and strategic planning of where to go next in the later levels. Buttons were added to allow for some basic climbing, and the levels do offer a few instances of using the dive (slo-mo or otherwise) to make some basic jumps, but it often looks like the jumps will fall short, leading to some surprising (and amusing) miracle jumps where Jack just magically ends up rolling past the ledge he should have missed.
This just happens to be one of those games, and if nothing else, Dead to Rights II has the dubious distinction of being the single worst game I've played in a good five years -- and I used be a PR rep for 3DO. The development team at Widescreen games completely phoned in every single aspect of this game, and the result is something that looks and plays like a tech demo, and sounds like it was coded by a bunch of high school kids working on their first game. This is the kind of game that we used to make fun of when Criterion first showed off the RenderWare platform.
For those that didn't get a chance to play through the first Dead to Rights, you missed out on the kind of storyline and action one would expect from, say, a Steven Segal flick; some fun little moments where guys get their necks snapped punctuated by long stretches of meager story and lots of bad dialogue. And then there was the part where you could play as a stripper and get your dance on as a low-poly nudie girl gyrated away to distract bad guys. This and a few other mini-games helped break up the action a bit, but for the PS2 and GameCube versions, the game's biggest source of strategy, the difficulty, was more or less stripped out.
Whereas the first game concentrated on bad boy cop Jack Slate trying to clear his name after being framed for his father's murder, the sequel (which is technically a prequel) has you tracking down a kidnapped whistle-blower that was ready to bring down the city's biggest crime syndicate and the prominent city members of hoity-toity society that were connected to it. Jack's joined once again by his trusty K-9 partner Shadow, who reprises his role as resident baddie-mauler and weapons fetcher.
When the game first game out, the inevitable comparisons to Max Payne were made, and for good reason. Jack dives in slo-mo and shoots guys. This hasn't really changed for the sequel, and luckily there's still a nice adherence to taking cover, grabbing enemies for use as a human shield and strategic planning of where to go next in the later levels. Buttons were added to allow for some basic climbing, and the levels do offer a few instances of using the dive (slo-mo or otherwise) to make some basic jumps, but it often looks like the jumps will fall short, leading to some surprising (and amusing) miracle jumps where Jack just magically ends up rolling past the ledge he should have missed.
