Miami Vice: The Game
Filling the seedy underbelly of South Beach with bullet holes is fun.
Published: August 9, 2006
That I was left wanting more is probably a good thing (it's certainly better than too much), and it's due in no small part to how pretty the game can be at times. Though the night missions are near-impossible to play under natural light (so you'll want to play them at, uh, night), the daytime stuff looked fabulous, and the in-between missions where the skies are painted in rich oranges and reds are downright beautiful. One of the levels has you running through a meth lab in a trailer park under a series of overpasses (shades of Scarface), and I actually had to stop to look around and take it all in.
Texture detail is modest, as is the modeling on the characters (if a little low-poly, but this is a PSP game), and I thought re-using the same models and animations for all three drug barons was lame, but it's the overall look of the game that really sells the visuals. Though it certainly didn't seem like outright ragdoll (the effect was just too wonky), enemies do die in realistic ways, usually reacting to a final shot in location-specific areas -- even though there's a lot of popping from one recoil animation to the next (or sometimes the same one looped jarringly) when you're hitting enemies with the first few shots.
If the visuals seek to immerse, then the audio is concerned only with pulling you out. The credits listed a whopping three people in the voice cast, and it shows; every enemy in a level sounds the same, and they all rattle off the same five or six statements throughout the level. This is bad enough, but the voice acting as a whole is pretty terrible, with poorly faked or almost offensively clichéd-sounding characters. To top it all off, the compression on the voices is absolutely horrid. Any sharp sounds are buried under static hiss, and you'll hear them. A lot.
The music, at least, is far better. For the most part things are laced with light R&B elements; splashy snares and staccato bass hits, but there are moments where Tom Bible, John Cleasby and Ken Turner's tunes take a turn towards the older 80's sound with long guitar notes, then perk up into a synthy electronic theme. In between, more ambient loops fill in the noise. It's all really quite well done, and begs for headphones rather than the PSP's tinny speakers.
I never bothered to get into the fact that this is a licensed game because for the most part it wisely steers clear of trying to incorporate elements from the movie into a portable experience. What Miami Vice [b]does[/i] do, however, is make for a very, very fun shooter that doesn't try to do too much. Some elements may feel a little half-baked (the respect system), and others underutilized (like the hacking mini-game), but it's still overall a compelling shooter that actually feels at home on the PSP rather than something that was forced onto the hardware.
Miami Vice isn't a must-have, and for most, I'd say it's a solid rental. The lack of replayability and re-use of main game bits for the multiplayer mean you'll just tire of what's there that much faster. If it were just a little longer, this would feel worthy of a full-price purchase. When it does drop to bargain bin price, though (say, sub-$20), snap this sucker up the second you see it.