When it was announced that the new NARC would feature characters using street drugs, people naturally wondered whether the game would send the wrong message. It certainly does, by portraying drug use as annoying, vaguely unpleasant, and ultimately boring. Drugs are a lot of things, but not those things.
NARC tries to be yet another free-roamer, one in which you, as a night-shift big-city detective, have to make a series of moral choices. Keep your nose clean, make good arrests, and turn in contraband as evidence, and you're awarded a high Badge Rating, meaning common street criminals just give up when you approach them. Go the dirty-cop route—which almost every player automatically will—and you can shake down bad guys and citizens alike for cash, weapons, and drugs, then use the drugs for in-game bonuses. Fine, as far as it goes. Even Pac-Man took pills. But this game—running as it does on the same spastic engine used in the Rockstar-produced flop State Of Emergency—is so ugly to begin with, with claustrophobic environments, harsh sound, and jerky animations, that fatigue sets in around the time you actually get your first collar.
When you finally get to try these drugs that everyone's so allegedly scared of, it's quite a disappointment, not to mention hilariously inaccurate. Pot increases reaction time and sharpens combat reflexes, LSD uses hallucinations to sharpen threat perception, and ecstasy mellows the bad guys out and prevents them from attacking. Most baffling of all, crack makes you such a deft, self-controlled expert gunman that enemies will suffer serious damage from a single gunshot wound to the chest, something they'd usually just shrug off. Yes, it's just a video game, but this flies pretty damn hard in the face of what crack—and for that matter, gunshot wounds—are about.
Beyond the gameplay: The original NARC was a tongue-in-cheek look at the late-'80s near-future of drug enforcement. It was quite violent for its time, featuring dangerous flocks of needle-tossing junkies as its basic enemies, though it had a genuinely rocking theme song. The needle-tossing junkies are in the new version, minus humor or rocking song, but plus Cypress Hill. Hooray.
Worth playing for: The lure of unlocking the original '80s NARC game by (what else?) collecting secret drug stashes. However…
Frustration sets in when: The original NARC, for all its nostalgia value, was just okay. And it's already available as one of the games on Midway's extremely fun Classics collection.
Final judgment: Winners don't use drugs to sex up their ultimately mediocre, derivative products.