C.O.P. The Recruit

Kombo’s Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don’t waste your time. This is why we’ve split our reviews into four sections: What the Game’s About, What’s Hot, What’s Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What the Game’s About
C.O.P. The Recruit is an open-world game on the DS that puts you in control of Dan Miles, a former illegal street racer turned C.O.P., better known as Criminal Overturn Program recruit. Your partnership with a Detective Winter hits a road block when he is falsely arrested and Dan turns back to his former life to figure out what exactly happened. This time around, he’s undercover. The arrest was just one part of a vast conspiracy that has horrible repercussions if the plan succeeds.

What’s Hot
If someone were to glance at the game on your DS, they might mistake it for a full-blown Grand Theft Auto game. COP is a much tamer approach to open-world, sandbox-like games; however, the technology that is it built around is some of the most impressive seen on the DS yet. You have free reign over New York City where you run and drive all over the place. There are pedestrians, lamp posts, mailboxes and other background items that bring the city to life. The game runs smoothly with no noticeable slowdown. You can walk around the nine square miles of New York or you can commandeer a vehicle and buzz around quickly. The scope of the city is impressive for the DS for how well the game runs. Sure, there is some draw distance but that is a negligible issue. Inside the tall buildings of New York are equally impressive environments. The police HQ feels like a working office that you could jump right into.

COP brings the backup with an impressive amount of content that will have you sweeping the streets of criminals. There is the core mission story that will carry you until the end but that isn’t the whole story. There are side missions you can carry out that will provide you with some extra content if you are the type that wants to complete everything. Some of the missions require the use of the touchpad or the microphone to coordinate backup help.

What’s Not
COP could have used some more training with weapons. Controls in the game, specifically the aiming, don’t lend themselves well to quick bursts of action. When you want to shoot your gun, you have to pull out your stylus and use the touchpad to move your on-screen reticule over the bad guys. It creates this unnatural break in the action that makes already difficult action sequences more difficult because the lag time between moving and fighting. The camera is a related problem because when you want to adjust the camera angle when you are on foot with the “A” and “Y” buttons, Dan stops dead in his tracks while the world turns. It keeps the camera in check but is a source of annoyance.

With all the technical prowess and content thrown in your face to marvel at, COP misses out on what other sandbox games tend to miss out on: creating a connection with your characters. The story isn’t all that gripping but is decent for a video game of this genre. You do play a bad guy turned goody-two-shoes for the entire game, so any freedom you might have derived from other sandbox games that allow you to unleash wanton destruction is not going to be present in COP.

Final Word
It is a nice change of pace to play the good guy once in awhile. COP is a technical masterpiece on the DS and shows off that the handheld still has many surprises beyond creative control schemes. There is a lot of combat and, overall, COP is good, it just lacks some of the elements that pull you deeper into the world.