Dead to Rights is an over-the-top third person shooter that never seems to figure out what tone it wants to be. The plot is crazy, yet played oddly straight. It involves Jack Slate as he tries to figure out who killed his father. As he murders a load of staff in a nightclub, he eventually catches up to his target only to find him dead, so he gets framed for murder. As Slate is the one of the few “good” cops in a corrupt city, he is sentenced to death, but hatches a plan to escape. As a prison warden insulted his dog, he brutally murders him as he flees the prison.
Films already have an issue trying to sell the “break laws to prove your innocence” trope, but in Dead to Rights, you kill hundreds of hundreds of people, some of which might just be innocent workers. Taking hostages is a big part of the game (it’s the main cover mechanic), and when you’re finished with them, Slate doesn’t knock them out, he brutally executes them. The dissonance between aspects of the game makes the experience rather jarring, and why it should have gone for a sillier approach for the whole thing.
Then there’s the gameplay itself, which is nothing remarkable. It’s a by-the-numbers Max Payne-style shooter, complete with diving for slow-motion. It’s fine for the first few levels, but it gets tedious very quickly, as the game does nothing more than just throw loads of enemies. Many rooms have the same structure of shooting your way through it, finding a locked door and then enemies spawn behind you, the last one you kill has a key. The most disappointing aspect is the levels themselves, as they’re so static. In a game like this, you want loads of stuff flying around, begging for destructible objects (you even have a gunfight in a room of ice blocks), yet nothing can be destroyed.
There is a small amount of variation. In some sections, you have no guns and the game turns into a very simple beat-’em-up. Sometimes your character throws away his guns needlessly, other times your guns just vanish between levels. There are also some simple button-bashing minigames such as controlling a stripper to distract guards, withstanding torture and picking locks. Impressively, all of these manage to outstay their welcome. You also have a dog with you, but it amounts to nothing more than a special instant kill move, and then it vanishes from existence.
With some more exciting set-pieces, destructible objects and embracing its sillier stuff, Dead to Rights could have been an enjoyable romp. Instead, it ended up being something that quickly turns tedious and something you wish would end sooner.