C.O.P. The Recruit starts off with a series of car chases, protocol lectures, and tutorialized shootouts impressively rendered in a surprisingly accurate version of the New York Metropolitan area. The player is cast as Dan Miles, some awful experimental hybrid of The Fast and the Furious hero Brian O'Conner and Ace Attorney's Phoenix Wright. Dan is a former street racer brought onto the force via the Criminal Overturn Program (I love it when I know that they came up with the acronym before the meaning of the acronym.) C.O.P. has the player stopping heists, ferrying people around the city, shooting bad guys, and performing stylus-centric mini games in an investigation of artist-gone-bad terrorist group Bomb Zombie (which is also the name of my new GWAR/Kid Rock crossover cover band.)

The narrative premise isn't groundbreaking by any means, but formally it is new territory for the DS. While Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars created an open world for the system last year, it was missing many of the components that we associate with the genre. By placing the view above the action, the movement through Chinatown Wars' world was impacted. We were unable to create recognition of visual landmarks, which in turn removed the ability to move through that world without relying on navigational aids like the map or in game GPS. We also lost the persistence of a single action-driving segment. Because they were so easily knocked off the screen (or incapacitated entirely), the police that were chasing you at the start of a scene weren't the ones who you'd eventually shake. The change in perspective also modified how the combat worked. In recent open world titles, combat has begun to incorporate strong tactical play - cover elements, resource management, and AI actually worth a damn. Chinatown Wars returned to hectic "arcade-y" action. Rockstar presumably made these choices because they were what was best for the game - and the end product turned out great. C.O.P. is the first real effort to see if those innovations Rockstar wouldn't touch are conquerable on the platform.

After playing C.O.P. I believe firmly that, yes they are. I also believe that this isn't the title to do it. It's a simple matter: C.O.P. wows you with an impressive graphical engine, well put-together cutscenes, and a surprisingly spot-on recreation of metropolitan New York City, and all of this is even more impressive because it's coming from the underpowered DS. Your low expectations are inverted. But while technical proficiency like this is a rarity on the DS, well designed games aren't. We've come to expect consistent, clean, playable DS games - and it's here that C.O.P. disappoints.

For instance, the driving physics are fine. I was able to maneuver around to the approximation of three places I've lived in the past two years. That's why I know we'll have an open world DS game with good driving one day - but the interaction with driving objects is entirely without physics. No matter how fast your car or someone else's car is moving, crashing plays out identically. It isn't a canned animation, because it's barely animated: your car stops while the car you hit keeps going, tied to its track. This is especially frustrating in "chase" levels where you're tasked with ramming a car in the rear bumper until it stops.  You slam into it, your car decelerates to zero, and the bad guy speeds away on the same track he was on before. (Don't try hitting it anywhere else, like T-Boning it in the side, because it will do no damage at all.) In fact, the entire damage model is broken: cars take X damage before they blow up instantly. There is no effect before that amount to your car or anyone else's. Worse, the only thing that does change when you crash is the amount of damage you take, which fluctuates wildly and without any discernible logic.

The gun battles are even worse. Combat in C.O.P. is you versus a room (or sewer, or parking lot - I'll be fair) of bad guys running around randomly firing with pinpoint precision. There are no tactics, there is no cover here (besides you running into previous areas to wait for your health to regenerate). Line up shots, take damage, retreat, or die. Each encounter puts the player in the role of a glass cannon - you always end up equipped well enough to take out enemies in one shot each, but if the random AI movement patterns line up a certain way, you're done for.

What is most disappointing about C.O.P. is the way in which it strives for originality and comes up short. Because you are in a fully 3D environment, you can build landmark memory to navigate with - but this is undercut by an entirely obtuse navigation mechanic. Instead of automatically placing a waypoint on the map when you get a new objective, you have to open up a virtual PDA, find the name of the location or person you're headed to, add a pin to the map of their location, and then follow the map there. Yes, eventually I was able to navigate Manhattan by memory, but the first 15 hours were a mess of menus.

Worse, this more-stylus-time-must-mean-more-fun design philosophy extends to the game's "puzzles." Occasionally you will come to a locked door/garage/back door/car door/sewer grate and need to look up a number, then scribble that number into the DS, to get it to open. It's a waste of time that extends the play clock by at least an hour or two. Thankfully, a handful of the other minigames aren't so bad: choosing where to place swat team members, which race-route to take, using security cameras, and listening in to conversations with a microphone gun are all painless (though add little of worth themselves.)

C.O.P. The Recruit is not the Citizen Kane, Jazz Singer, or even the Birth of a Nation of open world DS games. But it still ought to be remembered as a game that dared to try. There are some genuinely decent intentions here, and the whole product isn't awful. It's just that if you took out all of the bad, all you'd be left with is you, a car, and a fairly accurate representation of the 25 miles I've lived in over the last three years. Okay, okay, I think maybe I'd keep the melodramatic cutscenes (a la Phoenix Wright, Hotel Dusk, and Trauma Center) too: seeing the mohawked leader of Bomb Zombie set a fountain on fire is just too funny to cut.

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Playthrough: Completed over the course of 25 hours.

Disclosure: Retail game provided for review by Ubisoft.

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