Dead to Rights

Sic the dog. That single command, mapped to a button and executed by a German shepherd named Shadow, is the thing most people remember about Namco's 2002 crime shooter, and it still separates the game from the crowd of post-Max Payne slow-motion action titles it arrived alongside. Shadow sprints across a room, takes a gunman by the throat, and drops the weapon at your feet. It is ridiculous. It also works, both as a tactic and as a character beat, because the dog is the only honest thing in Grant City.

Jack Slate is the cop framed for murder, and the story is assembled almost entirely from noir and Hong Kong action parts — corrupt department, dead father, nightclub shootouts, a prison stretch in the middle act. The shooting leans hard on the dive: press the button and Jack throws himself sideways in bullet time, pistols up, landing prone and still firing. Combat also includes a hand-to-hand system with grapples and disarms, so a fistfight can end with you tearing a shotgun out of someone's grip and turning it around. The camera struggles with tight corridors more than it should, and enemy placement often assumes you will eat the first few shots.

What makes it genuinely strange is the willingness to stop dead and become another game. Bomb defusal, a lockpicking timing test, arm wrestling, weightlifting in the prison yard, a sniper stretch, a rhythm sequence at a strip club. Some of these are throwaway, some are tedious on a second playthrough, and one or two are better than they have any right to be. Namco's arcade instincts show clearly here: the campaign is a variety show more than a coherent third-person shooter, and it changes its mind about what it wants to be roughly every twenty minutes.

Difficulty is the sticking point now. Certain chapters, particularly the later ones, demand near-perfect use of the dive and the human shield mechanic, and the checkpointing is unkind. Players who bounced off it in 2002 usually bounced off there.

It landed as a solid, loud, second-tier action title in a year crowded with better-drilled shooters, and that is still a fair place for it. But the confidence is real — a game that lets you throw a dog at a problem and then asks you to bench press is not hedging its bets. Grant City is grimy in a way sixth-generation lighting suited perfectly, all wet asphalt and neon smear, and Shadow remains one of the better animal companions the console ever produced.