I probably should have suspected something with the title, honestly. C.O.P.: The Recruit tells the tale of Dan Miles an ex-tough from the hard streets of New York that is recruited into the Criminal Overturn Program, which turns perps into police men. No, I'm not making that up, and you can probably extrapolate the kind of narrative power the game has going by the fact that they decided to turn "cop" into an acronym. Here's a hint, though: it's hilariously clunky and almost charmingly pockmarked with grammatical pratfalls right down to the help text that pops up after a mission.
It's not hard to overlook some of the game's eccentricities when you first start playing because, well, you've got a whole city to check out. You can take on bonus (and often rather tough) calls the come in through the radio to ram speeding cars or stop robberies, at which point you get to call up the map from your PDA, locate the nearest police station and draw in their phone number to have someone haul the perp off to jail (an unnecessary but cute bit of clunkiness), you'll be able to set GPS waypoints and scroll around on a real-time map. You can enter buildings, draw your gun and then clumsily stumble around corners firing at enemies like crazy or you can continue on with story missions and do things like set up a raid and allocate men to different parts of a building (though you'll have to clear out all the criminals yourself for the most part, so it's all a bit of fluff).
My point is, there are plenty of things to do in C.O.P.'s version of New York… or at least it seems that way. While the main story will keep you exploring the city and making ample use of the built-in directory in the GPS or scouring your built-in notes to catch up on conversations, the city itself is… well, it's dead -- a silky smooth veneer under which nothing of substance resides. And really a few years ago, that probably would have been enough to at least earn C.O.P. a commendation for technical prowess if nothing else. The problem is a little game called Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, which so perfectly embraced the DS hardware and populated its version of New York with so many well-defined personalities and touch screen-friendly mini-game actions that C.O.P. can't help but look like a quint tech demo by comparison.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the game's handling of re-trying missions. You're given awards if you can accomplish most tasks in a set amount of time, but if you want to re-try that challenge, you have to pull up your PDA and manually load your last saved game, which will drop you in Times Square and force you to find a car and drive out to the mission trigger, watching all the cutscenes attached to it before trying again. Clumsy, clumsy, clumsy, and annoying as hell.
Stripped of any redeeming story, characters or personality to the city itself, The Recruit becomes nothing more than a pretty engine with nothing surrounding it. The graphics are butter, of that there can be no doubt, but the sparse streets, lack of real drivers inside cars (you can blare your siren all you want, they aren't moving), pop-in and occasional hitches make it plain that this isn't really as substantive as it first seemed. The one area where the game does stand out, though, is in its interiors, which have been impressively laden with objects, be they desks or shelves filled with food or people walking around. These aren't big, empty rooms, so kudos to V.D.dev for keeping things interesting once you head inside.
The audio, unfortunately, is even weaker than the visuals. No voice acting, simplistic, sometimes grating loops for music and extremely low-fi sound effects for gunfire, tire squeals and ambient noise make this a game you won't need (and probably won't even want) headphones for. There's just nothing here that sounds better under the direct listening environment of a pair of nice cans.