April 11, 2005 - Midway has never been a company to shy away from the dreaded M rating. As a matter of fact, apart from its sports titles, it seems that almost all its other properties earn the M rating without batting an eyelash. For older gamers, this means a game that offers no compromise. A Mortal Kombat experience in which the words “Finish Him” hold a certain weight. A game like The Suffering which will enthrall, captivate, horrify and delight all at once. A true gaming experience that will not sugarcoat the scenery with colorful rainbows or dumb its language down to earn more mass-market appeal. Midway has always been a company that has gone down the road less traveled and more often than not, struck gold.

The original NARC arcade game (released in 1988) earned the respect of gamers and the contempt of parents worldwide for embracing and encouraging the use of drugs within its side-scrolling action. Now, seventeen years later, Midway goes to the well again, and this time, mature rating firmly in hand, comes up dry.

This installment of NARC is, in one word, uninspired. Take cliché characters, place then in a plot that’s been done to death, give them a small boring city without imagination to run around in doing mundane tasks, add a dash of bland gameplay, a gimmick that doesn’t captivate, glitches upon glitches, annoying voice and audio problems, endlessly looping musical tracks and a strong desire to play any game besides this one and you basically have NARC. Yes, it’s sold at “friendly prices” but I would have gladly paid wholesale for a game with a little more quality and originality.

The story follows ex-partners Jack Fozenski (voiced by Michael Madsen) and Marcus Hill (voiced by Bill Bellamy) as they try to put their sordid history behind them while trying to stop the trafficking of a new super-drug hitting the streets of Rockland called Liquid Soul. The game opens with a CG cut-scene which quickly sets the tone: Marcus is the “good” cop and Jack is the “bad” cop. The rest of the game will try to make this even more plainly obvious.

When you first take control of Marcus (you will periodically switch between both characters) you will immediately notice that the designers have made up for shoddy aiming mechanics by giving you a crosshair that is magnetically attracted to bad guys. This alleviates a lot of frustration early on but never makes you feel like you ever have control over who you’re shooting at. The characters control fine beyond that and the running, jumping and crouching mechanics work well. The city is small and unimaginative (it feels like a small town in which everything is called by exactly what it is: The Beer Store, The Bank, The Donut Shop, The Restaurant) and a small map aids you in determining where your next objective is. The map also shows you bad guys (when applicable) with red dots (this works well) and crimes being committed with yellow dots (this doesn’t work so well).

NARC borrows from many games and oddly enough, between missions, it’s Spider-Man 2 that it tries to emulate. As Spidey, when not in the throws of a story objective, you got to travel around the city stopping runaway cars, thwarting bank robberies, catching purse snatchers and trying to get those cursed balloon that seemed to have minds of their owns. While a fun distraction in Spider-Man (except for those balloons), NARC lets you run around arresting break dancers, hookers, purse snatchers, drug peddlers and the likes. The problem is that it isn’t fun at all. On any given street, there are always at least 20 people to arrest it seems. Talk about shooting fish in a barrel. On top of that, you can arrest a drug dealer by simply flashing your badge and quickly pressing the grapple button. Other crimes require a little more fisticuffs, but the process becomes uneventful quickly and seems to generate very little in return besides raising your badge ranking meter (which is quasi-useless anyway). And while on the subject: remember in Spider-Man 2 the young child that kept asking for his balloon and the complete hatred you had for that voice? Well, NARC’s done that game one better. There’s a wonderful audio glitch (at least I hope it’s a glitch) in which a woman desperately yells “Help Police!” every minute. Literally! Is there a crime being committed? Is there even a woman on the street your character’s on? It doesn’t matter, you’ll hear it again and again and again.