Blast From Gaming’s Past: Dead to Rights

Welcome to “Blast From Gaming’s Past” a feature where the LosHarrowGames Staff look at a game from yesteryear hold it up to the sun and see if it still has something that can reel you back in. For the inaugural edition, I will be examining Dead to Rights developed by Namco USA and released by Namco which would become Bandai Namco. For the people who don’t know anything about video game history, Namco are responsible for some of the greatest arcade classics in history such as Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and Galaxian. But I am not here to give a history of Namco, I’m here to talk about Dead to Rights.

As soon as I finished the tutorial I had a strange sense of Deja Vu and then I discovered why this game made me feel that way, it is a Max Payne clone but not in the sense of the character Jack Slate who is out for revenge and is a cop, but in the sense of they are eerily alike gameplay wise. Especially with the use of bullet-time. There are, however, some nuggets of originality with the ability to take an explosive off the wall (what are they doing on the wall in the first place?) and throw it at an enemy and shoot it in slow motion. Perhaps the biggest thing that sets Dead to Rights apart is Shadow ie your K-9 partner who you can set off on enemies with weapons and out of nowhere he will tear the enemies throat out. Shadow can also be used to get through small crevices and tight spaces to help you get around otherwise unreachable areas.

The second level, however, turned me off in a big way by having the cringiest “sexy” moment in the entire game and that was the pole dancing minigame that made me want to stop playing the game and break the disc/delete the game from my Xbox One. Do yourself a favor and stay away from this game as it does not hold up even more so that it is enhanced by the Xbox One X uprezzing. Hopefully, I feel differently towards to Dead to Rights II when I do a similar look back at that game in this trilogy. As for Dead to Rights: Retribution… time will tell.