I was a big fan of the original Dead to Rights, even if it did receive more than its fair share of below average reviews. Sure it had plenty of flaws and the graphics were pants, but it had an intangible something special. Some of the action sequences from the original game were just superb, the story was pretty good (for a game) and the cemetery sequence still gives me the creeps to this day. If only Namco had taken that something special and filled the whole sequel with it, I wouldn't be compelled to fill the following paragraphs with so many negative comments.

The graphics of Dead to Rights 2 (DTR2 from now on) can best be compared to the ugliest chick in the pub as seen through thick beer goggles. At first glance she seems a bit of alright, but you just know that come morning you will be gnawing your own arm off to get away. That dirty 'I hope my friends didn't see me' feeling was what I was left with after spending the night with DTR2. On closer (sober) inspection, DTR2 looks exactly like the original game except somewhat blurry with a few extra particle effects.

Jack Slate, the hard as nails cop from the original game returns with his Police dog companion Shadow. The intro and surprisingly good Film Noir opening monologue of the original game impressed the hell out of me but unfortunately the follow up has obviously been written by monkeys. The dialog and voice acting have gone past the point of being 'so bad they're good' to 'so bad they're painful' with the lead character reduced to delivering one-liners obviously swept up off the sound stage floor from anonymous D-grade action flicks.

Gameplay remains essentially the same as the original, with Jack moving from room to room and killing wave after wave of generic bad guys with boss battles at the end of each level. Jack has an unnatural resistance to bullet wounds (and so does most of the bad guys) and fills his adrenaline metre for every enemy he kills. This adrenaline is use to perform Max Payne-esk 'bullet-time' dives by pressing the Y button and most of the games few cool moments will be seen mid slow-motion dive.

Additionally, adrenaline is slowly depleted when your K9 partner Shadow is flung into the action. Shadow can be used to attack enemies in hard to reach places and to retrieve weapons when Jack is unarmed. If your adrenaline metre drains to zero, Shadow will return to wherever he appears from. This becomes repetitive very quickly, but a new instant action option makes best use of DTR2's style of gameplay. DTR2, like the original, is best played in short spurts and serves as a great tension release if you can overlook its numerous flaws.

Gamers new to the series can now view video tutorials of all the games main controls and gameplay mechanics. This covers everything from locking onto targets with the Right Trigger to diving, hugging walls and snatching close standing bad guys to use as human shields. A nice touch for a game that is easy to pick up but hard to master, but while the video tutorials are nice, they're no replacement for actually taking part in an interactive tutorial.

The sound effects in DTR2 are somewhat lacklustre and don't really convey that sense of danger you would expect from a room full of flying lead. They sound better through a subwoofer but some of the weapons sound ridiculous. One silenced weapon sounds more like a laser gun from the set of Star Wars than anything from the real world. The music is also atrocious and consists of boring loops of uninspired crap and will have you switching it off in no time. Parents beware, as DTR2 contains an unnecessary level of coarse language, which serves no purpose other than to fill out the games mature rating.

The level design is the same shockingly simplistic room and corridor affair as the original with low detail textures and very low quality lighting effects. Due to sloppy level design once the last body hits the floor many levels may leave you scratching your head as to where to go next. Many times you are forced to backtrack through levels almost as if the developers were trying to squeeze some extra value out of their shoddy designs.

The character models are blocky, repetitive and with the exception of disarms, the animations are rough and robotic. Disarms were a major selling point of the original game and they make a welcome return in the sequel with a dozen or so extra moves thrown in for good measure. Get close to an opponent press the B button and Jack performs a sickeningly cool disarm move.

Disarms are performed when unarmed and in close quarters to a foe. They result in a slow-motion sequence of Jack Slate twisting, snapping and splattering enemies in over-the-top gratuitous moves that end with one dead bad guy and his gun in Jack's hand. Quick directional taps of the Left Thumbstick immediately after pressing the B button will vary the specific move Jack performs. They're nice, nasty and fun to do, but don't bring anything new to the series at all.

The mini games from the original Dead to Rights, such as the awful stripper game and bomb defusing puzzles have been dropped completely from DTR2. This is a welcome change as the original mini games were generally not much fun and tended to interrupt the action with detrimental effects to the gameplay. If you're after strippers it's probably best to save the money you planned to spend on this game and head down to Gold Fingers instead..

It's not quite all bad news for Dead to Rights fans however, as some improvements have been made. The unarmed fighting system has been overhauled and is now much easier to withstand with far less levels to slog through. It's still unexplained why the usually armed to the teeth bad guys periodically revert to fists, knives, bottles and baseball bats however. The fighting system is quite simple with only punch, kick, jumping kick and throw/grapple moves but it is six of one and half a dozen of another whether it serves to vary the gameplay or just disrupts the games momentum.