The Nintendo Basement – Your source for everything Wii, DS & Retro Nintendo

When a videogame console is released, developers, reviewers and gamers try to figure out what that system is capable of, and set boundaries accordingly. The DS, for example, is the console to avoid if you want to create a realistic open world environment in full 3D. At some point, however, an ambitious developer will create a game that throws all of those boundaries out the window, and in this case, the developer is Ubisoft and the game is C.O.P: The Recruit. However, pushing technological boundaries does not always result in good gameplay, so is C.O.P. a great game in it’s own right, or just a fancy tech demo to silence the naysayers?

You may have seen 3D games on the DS before, but I doubt you’ve ever seen anything quite as good as the graphics in C.O.P. The game world is a fairly accurate, 3D re-creation of New York City, and for a game attempting detail and realism, nothing has been compromised. The textures are very good, the frame rate is smooth, and the draw distance has been pushed right back. The streets are crowded with cars, the sidewalks are crowded with people, and the skyline is crowded with skyscrapers. There are missions, side-missions, and extras to search for and collect, and for longtime DS owners it is nothing short of jaw-dropping.

Once you start playing, you do begin to see some concessions that were made to fit everything into the game. When Dan (the character you play as) gets into a car, there’s no animation of him opening the door and getting in- the screen simply fades to white, then fades back with you controlling a car. Speaking of cars, they appear as coloured blobs at first, with details being added in as you get closer. Citizens can’t be run over or shot (they simply jump out of the way and are immune to damage), and they aren’t even pushed out of the way when you run into them on foot. Also, cars don’t have damage modelling, so a life bar is used to show you how damaged the car is. These are minor details though, and they don’t affect the gameplay.

Unfortunately, there are many other issues that do affect the gameplay. The controls, for one thing, are awful. They require you to use all of the buttons as well as the touch screen, and as usual it feels really clumsy when you have to switch between the two control methods. The touch screen is used to aim when a weapon is drawn, and aiming is as un-intuitive as you could possibly get. The main problem is that the crosshair moves far too slowly (if you cross the entire screen with your stylus, you’ll barely exceed 90°) and there’s no option to change the sensitivity. The cars are also a pain to control, with poor steering and awful, glitchy physics.

To make matters worse, the missions and side-missions fail to be entertaining. A lot of the early missions involve apprehending other cars by ramming them until they’re too damaged to move. Of course, since the car physics are garbage, you can’t hit them from the side, nudge them off the road, get in front and block them, shoot at them, or anything else that’s fun or intuitive. The only way to damage a car is to tailgate it and ram into it from behind, which is as boring and frustrating as it sounds. Other missions that require you to get to a certain location or shoot certain people are just as bad, due to the aforementioned control issues.

The game’s menus are handled through a device called the 3C, and it’s an absolutely terrible addition that hurts the game even further. It strives to make everything as complicated and time-consuming as possible, so something as simple as setting a GPS marker to your next mission is a chore that takes forever. Some missions require you to enter PIN numbers for various reasons, and you have to write these manually like in Brain Training. This doesn’t add anything to the game, and it simply means that an already lengthy process will take even longer to complete. It honestly feels like the developers just threw in a bunch of features for the sake of showing off, rather than for the sake of gameplay.

C.O.P: The Recruit has amazing technology, there’s no doubt about that. However, that technology just doesn’t result in a good game. It’s boring, clunky, incredibly frustrating, and at times feels almost unplayable. In the end, maybe it’s true that you can’t create a truly 3D open world on the DS- or at the very least, one with decent controls and fun gameplay.

By Mark Vellios

Graphics: A+

A huge open world with no fog, no slowdown, and loads of detail.

Sound: B-

Not much variety in tunes, but definitely catchy.

Gameplay: E-

Awful controls, boring missions, and convoluted menus. It just isn’t fun to play.

Overall: E+

On a technical level, it’s a benchmark for the DS. On a gameplay level, it won’t hold your interest for more than five minutes.