NARC Review

NARC is a third-person action game where you play the role of one of two narcotics officers and it is your job to bust all of the dealers, prostitutes, and crackheads out on the streets. Unfortunately, what all this means in terms of gameplay is that you literally do nothing in NARC but kill random people and do drugs. All of the killing and drug abuse isn’t even that well implemented so NARC is a pretty disappointing experience

The main idea behind NARC is that you are a “good cop” or a “bad cop” based on your actions out on the street. A good cop turns in the drugs and weapons they confiscate and actually tries to serve and protect the community. A bad cop, on the other hand, kills anyone and everyone that they want, takes drugs, and keeps the stuff they confiscate for themselves. This is a somewhat interesting idea, but it is poorly implemented here. Going from bad to good status is incredibly easy and there is no real reward for being good. To be honest, being good and doing what you’re told is incredibly boring in NARC. When you are bad, you can beat up and arrest anyone you want, kill everyone you can find, and take a number of mind altering drugs which is a lot more interesting than being good. The problem, however, is that the gameplay and overall game design is so simple and shallow that the random violence stops being entertaining after the first level or so. So lets recap. Being good is boring but it moves the story forward. Being bad is more fun but it starts feeling repetitive faster than you can say “We desperately want to cash in on Grand Theft Auto’s success”. Good? Bad? It’s all pretty cruddy.

The gameplay in NARC is at times far too simple but at other times is far too complicated for its own good. You wander the streets and identify criminals and attempt to arrest them. You can flash your badge at them but usually a solid fist to their face is the best way to let them know who’s boss. At that point, you have to arrest them which requires a lot of button mashing and goofy power meters. If a perp decides to run you can whip out your gun and have a good ol’ shootout. The automatic targeting is extremely forgiving and you don’t even have to see an enemy to kill them because the game will do it all for you. Way too simple and stupid and boring. A main theme of NARC is that your character can take drugs which will have different effects on them such as speeding them up, slowing down everything, or giving all of the pedestrians bobbleheads (pretty obvious that one is LSD …). None of the drugs make all that much of a difference, though, and switching from using drugs to using guns is a strangely clunky experience that isn’t usually worth going through. NARC simply isn’t all that much fun to play.

Graphically, NARC is a pretty unremarkable looking game. It uses the State of Emergency engine so there are lots and lots of characters on screen at once but none of them have very much detail and the environments are similarly bland. Some of the death animations are cool looking, but for the most part the animation is stiff and robotic.

The sound is better than the graphics, but not by much. The story is told through dialogue by voice actors such as Michael Madsen and Ron Perlman but their performances are phoned-in and forgettable. Sound effects for fighting and guns and regular street noise are also nothing special. The soundtrack is a strange mix of songs obviously composed for the game (Midway and NARC are mentioned in the lyrics, hello!) and also much better licensed tracks from DMX, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Curtis Mayfield.

Overall, NARC is a pretty bland looking and sounding game that won’t impress anyone now and likely wouldn’t have impressed anyone even four or five years ago.

NARC is the latest example of a game that tries desperately to succeed entirely on a gritty atmosphere and an “edgy” storyline and ultimately fails miserably. The good cop / bad cop scenario has been done before and much better in True Crime and the random violence and murder has been in countless other games that are considerably better put together than NARC. The problem with NARC compared to other crime simulators such as the Grand Theft Auto series is that in GTA you had a lot of other stuff to do than just be a criminal. In NARC there is nothing to do other than beat up hookers and steal their drugs and that stuff has been old hat for years now in videogames. There is nothing really new here. Rent it if you must, but NARC is a game that you can skip entirely and you won’t be missing much. The bargain price of only $19.99 makes it tempting, but there isn’t anything you haven’t already seen before.