The leeway afforded you by the good citizens of New York extends to your pursuit of crime on foot as well. You’re free to walk up to any citizen on the streets and frisk them on the spot without having to worry about trivialities such as probable cause or the Bill of Rights. You can even skip the whole search bit and just beat on them if you want, which just makes them cuss at you. If you find anything you can arrest them by cuffing them and leaving them on the ground, presumably to be picked up later by some sort of police sweeper squad. You can also choose to plant evidence on them, which as far as I can tell only serves to earn you “bad cop” points. Since bad cop points don’t really do much other than earn you a demotion if you get too many of them, you can only wonder what the point is in planting evidence on someone and why you’d want to bother doing it.

The gunplay in the game is basically pointless as well. The target lock system is so idiot proof that you just need to hold the lock button and pull the trigger and you’ll quickly and efficiently kill everyone in the area – even those that you didn’t know where there until you killed them. Woo-hoo, what fun. The game also features hand to hand fighting and even a gtappling system that lets you grab people and smash them against walls or objects. It is more frustrating than fun, though, as the collision detection is terrible and you’ll find yourself grabbing at air more often than not. This is particularly frustrating when you need to run down and tackle fleeing suspects as it is about as easy at times as trying to catch a greased pig. I found it much easier just to grab a car and run them over. I also took advantage of the game’s poor AI by blocking their path with a car and then casually walking up to them and arresting them as they run in place convinced that they can move through a solid object. As you play the game you’ll come to see that maybe they’re not so crazy after all as the game has some issues with clipping and you’ll find spots where you’ll literally fall through the scenery.

So what you have here is a game that has a mediocre story, bugs and unbalanced play, weird rules of engagement, and a whole good cop/bad cop system that doesn’t really affect much at all. It’s hard to imagine that you’ll stick with this game to the end of the story, even though you’ll reach that point surprisingly quickly if you do. There must be an interesting story behind how a game with so many flaws and issues can make it to the light of day and with such a huge marketing effort behind it, but its not something that you’d want to spend $50 on.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 55%.  Releasing this game in its current state – now that’s a true crime.

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