It should happen to you. You’re a cop and while being on the beat you get called for something which seems like a little problem but once arrived at the scene of the crime you get shot at and only half a level further you see your dad getting killed by a gang of masked gangsters.

This is how Dead to Rights starts, the successful Xbox 3rd person shooter which now has been transferred to PC. The first mission is a prologue on the story and meanwhile your tutorial. You learn the controls, use of the bullet-time function, shooting around the corner, and much more. Once you’ve finished this you’ll go to the real levels and the pursuit of the man who killed your father. There isn’t much pursuit though because the actions are scripted; every time you see the killer you’ll fly to one of the many in-game cutscenes and see him escaping again. Many of these scenes would be pretty nice though… if the graphics would be ok.

Sadly enough, the graphics are pittyful. The main character is reasonably animated and is portrayed pretty sharp but that’s also where it stops. Textures of other characters are unclear, lupsynch isn’t necessary because there’s no facial animation and the textures of the surroundings are at certain moments as sharp as those of Duke Nukem 3D. Not really worthy for a pc game of this day and era. There even were moments that the text that should explain to me how a certain mini-game went was so blurry that I could hardly read what was written…

The game itself plays very fluently. With 1 key you target a badguy and with another you can serve him some lead. When they are with many, you can start up a bullet-time effect and you’ll be shooting enemies by the dozens. Believe me, there are more than enough of them ! For each opponent there are more than twice the amount of weapons available but the big disadvantage is that these weapons only have one ammo clip. Once you run out of it, it’s bye bye gun and you can go looking for a new weapon.
You can have your faithful dog go fetch you a weapon or get one yourself but there’s more going on with your poochie than eating enemies and getting guns, there’s for instance a sequence where it has to search for bombs which you have to dismantle.

These types of mini games are frequent in Dead to Rights. In mission 2 you’ll have to get 10 packets of cigarettes which you get by winning a game of boxing from someone, lifting some weigths, etc… minigames in themselves are fun, as long as they don’t crash. As an example, I had to hit a punchball as many times as possible within two minutes by clicking on the left and right buttons of the mouse but I saw about 4 times how the timer counted down while I couldn’t do anything anymore as the game refused to continue. All in all this isn’t so bad as you can restart as much as you want but this gets really annoying when you’re messing around with dangerous stuff like bombs and you can’t save.

One of the biggest problems of console ports is saving. There where other developers try to solve this problem by making a worthy safe function, LSP whipes their foots on this issue. You can save at any point in the game but when you load a savegame you’ll end up at the beginning of the level no matter what and your whole progress gets ignored unless you passed a savepoint. The perfect way to enlarge gametime but also the perfect way to downgrade the gameplay.

Dead to Rights has too many failures to become a top game and even too many to leave a somewhat positive impression. Missed chance of LSP because the fluent gameplay combined with a minigame here and there has something nice. Better luck next time.