Basically, Miami Vice is designed to be a third person action shooter. As either Crockett or Tubbs, you work your way through a series of short missions, which mainly consist of gunning down your enemies and opening locked doors, in order to reach your goal. From the start, the game screams out its shoddiness. You have to run the game from the CD menu, you can only change the graphic settings from the CD setup menu, not in game, and as it loads it instructs you not to turn you PC off. What?!
Once the action starts, the first of two flaws arise. To aim and shoot requires a fiddly combination of pressing the right mouse button and clicking the left. But the mouse also controls the camera, so, before you know it, the screen is spinning dizzily as you fight with it to try and line up a shot. You can't strafe, you can't set any hot keys; it's lock on and shoot away until the baddies are dead. Only you tend to die more often, as you can be hit by bullets and not realize this, as Crockett and Tubbs barely react. Or they do react but as if they have just been stung by a grumpy bee. You can also find yourself having locked on to a target, only to find your shots hitting a wall, while the enemy shoots back and hits you accurately down the same line of sight.
Turning up the graphics detail doesn't help either. The second huge flaw in the game is that, although my PC outperformed the recommended specs by double, at full detail the game slowed to unplayable speeds. It chugged and jerked and, as the graphics still looked little better than those you would find on the old Dreamcast console, I can only assume it is as a result of more half-assed coding.
Persist with the game and you can switch between Crockett and Tubbs in certain circumstances, but don't think this means you can approach missions in different ways. All it does mean is that if you are playing as Crockett and find a door you can't open, you switch to Tubbs and come and kick it down. That's pretty much the extent of the switch characters system.
This really is a very bad game. It has been made with no thought, no care and it is just a generic game with the words "Miami Vice" lazily tacked on. The makers couldn't even be bothered to write a storyline: it follows the plot of one of the TV episodes.
"Miami Vice" the TV show was never a favorite of mine, but any fan would be sorely tested by this joke of a game. DAVILEX appear to be responsible for a rotten "Knight Rider" game too.
Miami Vice is based on the 80's show of the same name. However, rather than doing any amount of justice to the adventures of Tubbs and Crocket, it absolutely fails on every level. The game was released on the XBOX, PS2, and PC. They obviously used the lowest common denominator, though that denominator was seemingly the Playstation 1.
The story in the game is sadly the best part. That's not to say it's good on any level, it's an episode from your cookie cutter cop drama. That just shows how bad the rest of the game is. The story follows Tubbs and Crocket as they try to perform a series of drug busts, and stop a number of killings.
The graphics resemble a somewhat anti-aliased Playstation 1 game. The textures are repeated often and are very bland. The character models are decent, but have a pretty low polygon count. The guns that you pick up are rendered in a low polygon count and look unspectacular. Some are even mislabeled, such as the M16 they label as a "sub-machine gun".
The audio in the game is bland, and the only standout thing is the theme in the main menu, but that's accompanied by a dizzying scrolling ocean texture, so you try to get out of there as quick as possible. The rest of the game just has a sort of hum instead of any kind of music. The weapon sounds are decent, but very bland and not standout at all. The characters in the game are thankfully not voiced by the original actors, because they surely wouldn't want to be associated with this steaming pile of crap.
The gameplay is simply the worst part of the game. First of all, even on the PC, there is no option to change the key configuration to your liking. There are two premade configurations, but this is clearly the markings of a lazy PC port. It is even clearer because there is no actual aiming in this game, rather there is a crappy auto-aim system. Why this would be needed on the PC is anyone's guess. You press the right mouse button, which locks onto a target, and you have to keep that pressed down as you press the left mouse button, so that you can shoot. The worst part of it all is that when you press down the right mouse button and there are no targets nearby, you spin. This adds even more frustration to the already annoying camera, which usually focuses on the back of your character, but will randomly switch to angles that are looking down on him, creating a moment of unnecessary confusion.
The A.I. in the game is stupid, and they tend to walk right up to you as you're shooting them. They will sometimes take cover behind objects, but only if they were already standing next to one. There is also a simplistic two character mechanic, which lets you switch between Tubbs and Crockett. However, the only difference beside the starting weapon is that Tubbs can kick through some doors, and Crockett can climb. Also, if one of you happens to die, the other can just walk up to you and press the action key to miraculously revive you. This makes the game even sillier, especially combined with the automatic healing.
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