Review:
C.O.P. The Recruit

Driving. Shooting. Racing. Missions. Car-jacking. Sandbox gaming. Sound familiar? It probably does, because C.O.P. The Recruit manages to be every game you’ve ever played – and does it all badly.

You take on the role (and rather snazzy blue jacket) of Dan Miles, a former street racer who gets pulled in by Detective Brad Winter. As part of the Criminal Overturn Program (C.O.P.), Dan must now become the law, even though nobody trusts him or his mentor.

As flimsy excuses for anti-heroes go, it’s right up there with ‘one last job’, and the rest of the game doesn’t get much better. Hilariously stilted, error-ridden text dialogue regularly informs you that the other cops don’t trust you and things only get worse when Brad is arrested for some strange reason. So naturally, you do what every loose cannon, trigger-happy cop-on-the-edge-with-nothing-to-lose does: you infiltrate the gangs and become a criminal. It’s all to do with some story involving a terrorist group’s plot to blow up New York, but, to be honest, that’s just window dressing for the sandbox driving.

The game’s biggest, and perhaps only, remarkable achievement is the quite stunning fully 3D environment, with the bare minimum of loading times and for that, developers VD-Dev should be highly praised. While New York itself has been hacked apart with a carving knife, providing a weird tourist’s-eye-view of the city, the six square miles on offer are genuinely stunning, pushing the DS’s capabilities almost to the limit. Sadly, this comes at a cost – the visuals. Cars appear as coloured triangles until they get five feet away, the entire city is a monotonous grey colour and, most criminal of all, New York is apparently filled with clones of the same man and woman in the same outfit. You won’t know by looking at them what sex they are, but run over them (but you’re supposed to be a good guy, you cry? Never fear – you can’t kill any civilians no matter what) and you’ll either hear ‘hey!’ (man) or ‘what?’ (woman). It borders on pathetic.