Gaming the Pandemic - Day 3 - Dead to Rights II (Xbox)

Latest in my attack of (at least) one game from my 643 strong backlog every day that the UK is in 'lock-down'.

I'm not planning on completing them, just playing them for long enough to know:A) What they're all about.B) If they're good enough to continue playing ASAP

For day three my random game selector has picked...

Dead to Rights II for the OG Xbox.

Third sequel in a row but at least this time I've play the first game!

For a series with 4 instalments, Dead to Rights has always had a rough time with the critics. I really enjoyed the first game though, certainly more than I enjoyed Max Payne 3, to use a pertinent comparison; so I'm quite looking forward to this one.

Sadness first of all, as this is the first time I've tried to use my beautiful 21" Bang & Olufsen CRT this year and it appears to dead. RIP old friend. Guess I'm playing this on the plasma...

Which is kind of apt as the game can be played in 16:9 ratio - funnily enough if the developer wasn't called 'Widescreen Games' I wouldn't have thought to check.

The game starts with a perfunctory story in which a kidnapee is revealed to have the name 'McGuffin' - My eyes hadn't stopped rolling at that by the time the oh-its-the-2000s-and-this-character-is-a-girl-so-TITS moment happened. Very different times indeed.

And talking of different times, lord is this game ever brown! So brown that it's difficult to tell the reddy browns from the yellowy browns and the greeny browns... which basically means it's annoyingly difficult to spot enemies against the backgrounds - which is a shame because the simple fun of diving around in slow-mo is a bit of a winner, so it's frustrating when the fun is cut short by a shotgun wielding guy in a brown (yellow) shirt hiding in plain sight against a brown (red) wall.

This single issue might not be enough to ruin the game on it's own, but paired with a weird control scheme (trigger to aim, A button to fire?) and the fact you have to always switch the target manually it's enough of a mess that I gave up after only a couple of levels.

I'm slightly intrigued to know if this works better with a Dualshock controller, or if some of the brownness is due to the set up I had to use... but it's something I'm not really in any hurry to find out in all honesty.

Dead to Rights II - Don't bother

Previously...

Day One was the excellent Luminees II on PSP

Day Two was the fun-but-probably-better-in-co-op Sanctum 2 on PC