C.O.P. The Recruit was announced back at E3 in June, and quickly marked itself out as one to watch by promising an open world experience unlike anything on DS. Now we've had chance to grab a few minutes with the title, does it live up to the hype or is it lagging behind Chinatown Wars?
The first thing you'll notice on loading up C.O.P. is that it looks pretty. Very, very pretty, in fact: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars did a good job of recreating its predecessors' top-down graphical style, but C.O.P. is more in line with GTA's first forays into 3D, resembling GTA III or Driver in its viewpoint and style. Traditionally there's not been a huge amount of open world third-person shooting games on DS, but C.O.P. makes the machine sing with a silky smooth framerate, rock solid polygonal architecture and high resolution textures and faces. It's more in line with a PSP title than the sort of graphics you'd expect from Nintendo's handheld.
Even when driving it's remarkably quick, and the detail is impressive too - driving into a bus shelter will knock all its glass out, and you can even plough through fences and see them scatter the pedestrians. Bottom screen holds your GPS and mission objectives, with the top screen handling all the impressive 3D graphics. Control is very straightforward with the D-Pad moving your character, Y and A rotating the camera around your character (although irritatingly you can't move and rotate the camera at the same time), and the driving sections even feature a horn mapped to Select!
The story revolves around Dan Miles, a former underground street racer who becomes part of the Criminal Overturn Program, which involves becoming a street detective in order to protect New York citizens from large-scale threats. Along the way he slowly becomes embroiled into a deadly conspiracy culminating in a potentially catastrophic attack that only he can prevent. It may not be Shakespeare, but it's the kind of story that does its job and frames the satisfying driving and shooting elements you'd want in a title like this.
The accomplishment of cramming such an impressively detailed 3D city onto DS would normally be enough to stir our hearts, but the speed and smoothness with which the game moves puts it way above 90% of the DS's catalogue. Although we only had a brief hands-on session with the game, we came away thoroughly impressed at what the developers had managed to squeeze out of the DS, and with another month still to go until the game is released the finished product should be even more advanced than this extremely impressive opening.
Comments (21)
That looks hot for a DS game!
yeah seriously...where did this come from? I love open-world on my handhelds...they're great pick up, play a mission or 2, put down types of portable games. This one's definitely all over my radar.
Very interested in this game. Looks fantastic.
One of the best DS games of this year so far!
Wow - that looks pretty darn cool, cheesy sounding plot is rather appealing too... 'Dan Miles' is a good street racer turned crime fighting name for the main character, even if its not as cool as Airwolf's 'Stringfellow Hawke'.
The guys from GTA should be ashamed for making such a mediocre game on the DS. Incredible that Ubisoft dared to do what GTA didn't.
Now I hope it ends up being a good game.
Been waiting for this game for a while, since it's finally a GTA clone that might beat GTA (on the DS, of course). If they don't screw it up, I will be one happy camper =)
I enjoyed the DS iteration of GTA, so I'm curious as to how this will turn out.
@buffalobob: I wouldn't call GTA DS a mediocre game, it's one of the highest rated DS games there is.
If this one fails, we can always go back to Chinatown Wars or GTAIV.
This has to be one of those DSi-specific games, right? I don't see them pulling something like this off on the DS Classic or DS Lite's slower processors and lesser VRAM.
COP: The Recruit in white plastic. Hmm...
I hope that this title delivers. Its quite obvious that, at least from a technical POV, they put a lot of effort into it.
Wolf - I played this on a regular DS Lite
Looking good, the DS hardware is really getting pushed now. I hope the Wii gets similar treatment soon.
@taffy The only reason Chinatown Wars scored so high was because it has GTA in it's name. It was a good game, but not that good.
cop the recruit is aswome
they should make games during robin hood like that open world cool
I hope COP will have DSi-specific extras. That would increase the chance of me buying the game.
If its just at least half as good as it looks then I think I'll be purchasing this one ,looks great and cheesy in a good way.Thanks for the preview Prosody.Been wanting to hear a bit more about this game since I seen it at E3.
It looks good but shooters don's usally work on the DS.
possibly....will have to see review most likely
but could be quite good
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