E3 2009: Hands-on: Miami Law - News
by VGChartz Staff , posted on 12 June 2009 / 2,069 Views
You've got your good cop, Sara Starling, from the FBI. She likes looking through video surveillance tapes for clues, hacking into computers, and analyzing data and such. Ya know, boring cop stuff. And you've got your bad cop, Law Martin, from the Miami PD. He likes car chases, shootouts, car chase shootouts, and the occasional sniping. Miami Law lets you choose whose story to follow, and you can go back and forth as you please. You can play the whole game as Sara or as Law, or play a little of each. Either way it will take two complete playthroughs to experience every mission and to get every side of the story.
The missions themselves are a very diverse collection of shootout levels and other various mini-games, ranging from matching pieces of evidence and hacking computers to untying hostages and picking locks. But they are all used to move the crime drama narrative forward, in which you're saving Miami from a terrorist organization. After completing the main story mode you can also unlock other mini-games like poker and sudoku.
I tried some of Law Martin's shootout missions, in which you tap on enemies to shoot them and tap on an arrow icon to take cover and reload. To hop back out into the firefight you just tap the same icon again. I tried this in a warehouse and again in a moving car. The cover system made it play more like classic Time Crisis than something like Touch the Dead.
Sara's the calm analytical FBI agent, so she gets all the intellectual mini-games. I used the stylus to examine several frames from a surveillance camera to look for anything unusual, and in another mission I was rotating 3-D shapes to find a match in a database to see what sort of biological weapon was being used.
The demo they had at E3 was actually in a debug mode allowing me to select any mission in the game while skipping the plot. So after getting the feel for each character's style I skipped to a sniping mission much further in the game. I was really far from my target, so they very small on the screen, and my aiming was horrible and shaking all over the place. I had to drag the stylus to aim ahead of my target, and then breathe into the microphone to steady my aim. I had to control my breathing to calm down and steady my rifle. This made it much more immersive and nerve-wracking than the typical sniper rifle arcade game.
While developed by Hudson in Japan, this game marks the first localization effort by Victor Ireland's new company, Gaijinworks. Ireland had previously founded Working Designs, which for almost 20 years had been localizing Japanese games into English, most notably JRPGs such as the Lunar series. Working Designs had been localizing and publishing games for the TurboGrafx-16, Turbo CD, Sega CD, Saturn, PS1, and PS2, but now as Gaijinworks they're making their comeback on the DS.
It should also be noted that Hudson and Gaijinworks are so serious about capturing the essence of Miami that they flew out the Japanese development team to Miami to experience the city and meet the Miami PD. It even has an original soundtrack by Miami Beat Wave.
If you're into detective work, shootouts, and fat Miami beats, or a fan of Working Designs, Miami Law just came out in the US this week.
Trailer and more screens below:
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Looks cool, like something I would've been playing on the Saturn years ago. I like this nostalgia effect.
The pictures aren't working for me. :( But I must say this game sounds like fun.
