Drug Wars

SHOOT. THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD.

A Review of Drug Wars

Michael Allen

There used to be a television show called something like

“To Shoot or Not To Shoot”, on during the filler-time of

Sunday afternoons without football. The show presented some of the

training that police officers go through. One aspect of this education

that lent itself well to television was a special room

where a film of a made-up crime scene was shown to the trainees, and

they had to decide whether to shoot or not to shoot the person they

were “interacting” with. For instance, in one scene an irate woman in

a bathrobe walks towards the camera, verbally abusing the poor

trainee. For a split second, her hand sweeps from behind her back and

you can see that she holds a gun. If the trainee did not spot this,

the woman would shoot him without provocation several seconds later.

Drug Wars is not quite as clever as this.

This third-rate shoot ‘em up puts the player in the

point-of-view of an officer presumably in the DEA, though what

denomination of official the player is is never fully expounded upon.

It’s main distinguishment from the “Lethal Enforcers” arcade game is

that Drug Wars gives the player about 450 megs of compressed live

action video to shoot at. Basically your task is to go through

different scenarios, blasting as many bad guys as you can without

shooting civilians or your partner. Using the mouse, you have about a

quarter of a second to click on a bad guy before he or she blows you

away, which usually results in a sarcastic remark from your

not-so-understanding partner. “Hey, you’re dead! Isn’t that bad?” is

one of the more clever ones.

Drug Wars has many problems, not the least of which is that

the setup program failed to correctly configure for my SB 32 AWE, and

that the game crashed and had video problems frequently. The

compressed movies are quite blocky, even for VGA standards. This

can not only make the game unpleasant to look at, but if something

small happens (like your stereotypical evil Colombian gun-toting drug

dealer popping out from behind some well-placed explosive barrels fifty

feet away which only seem to be set off by bullets after he dies), chances are

your eye will miss it.

Beyond technical difficulties, the game play is, to the say the

least, repetitive. The scenarios, besides general scenery, have

little to distinguish one from another. Also, at times it is

infuriatingly hard to shoot a bad guy. The game gives the player

about a quarter of second to recognize that a bad guy has stood up way

in the background before your character becomes intimately familiar

with the city morgue. You practically have to know that this bad guy

will pop up at this point, at this time, in order to be able to move on.

The fact that you can save the game mid-level, however, makes this process easy to

the point of being stupidly simple minded. Not usually a fan of, or

particularly good at, action games, I finished this one in less than

two hours on the easiest setting. There is little to entice me back

to playing the harder difficulty levels, and any dedicated action fan

will be quickly bored.

The plot, what there is of it, is laughable, and the so-called

characters even more so. The fact that full-motion video is employed

raised my expectations upon seeing the CD, but these were quickly cut

down in a barrage of cliches and mindless action. For something that

is supposed to “look real”, the cops in this game act like anything but.

Drug Wars has a couple of small things going for it. The save

game feature is handy, despite how easy it makes winning the game.

There are some inventive shooting sequences where the camera swoops,

turns, and dives with the POV of our hero, trying to see where the

next bad guy will be coming from. The production values are above

average, with actual bus crashes, piles of extras, and car and boat

and building explosions which were made, as far as I can tell,

explicitly for this game. But none of these pluses make up for the

utter lack of originality and creativity that plagues Drug Wars.

Gamer’s Zone Scorecard

Product:	Drug Wars
Company:	American Laser Games
Cost:	n/a

System Requirements:

n/a

Breakdown:

Fun Factor 2
Graphics 1
Sound 1
Interface 2
Replayability 1

Overall Score: