NARC puts you in the shoes of two law enforcement officials. Jack is a loose cannon drug addict that happens to also be a cop. Marcus is a DEA agent.
NARC plays like the "on foot" portions of any Grand Theft Auto game. In fact, GTA is the obvious inspiration for this cheap knockoff.
The gameplay is ok. If you're in wide open areas, you shouldn't have any problems moving around. Amining your weapons is done with the right joystick while your character's movement is done with the left. There is a bit of assistance from the game engine in your aim, so it works out.
Your missions range from talking down jumpers to raiding drug houses to taking pictures of drug lords to protecting a church to blowing up vans to selling drugs on the street...
Yep, you can be a bad cop. There's a catch though. When you do bad things, you get money, but your respect goes down. With lower respect, criminals don't fear you and will fight back more often. Also, you won't be able to progress in the game as you'll be booted off the force until you get respect again.
So why turn bad? Because you can make money. The catch in that is that money is totally worthless in the game. Sure, you can buy health with it, but health packs are so common and the penalty for death is so light, you'll never waste time going to get healed. You can also use the cash to buy weapons from the black market, but you don't need them. You'll pick up plenty of weapons during your missions. Plus, the weapons you'll save up for like rocket launchers, are pretty much worthless. There are very few vehicles to destroy and usually you won't have the room to shoot a rocket without injuring yourself or innocent civilians.
So, I guess the question should be put to the developers: Why even include "going bad" in the game if there's no purpose for it and it actually stops you fom progressing?
Another note about gameplay is that you'll do a lot of hand to hand combat. In fact, there are set moves you have to use to arrest people. For example, to arrest someone, you need to run up to them and get them ready to be arrested. You can show them your badge and they may surrender )or fight you), or you can just start attacking them to weaken them up, or you can just hit "Y" to grab the person to attempt the arrest. When you grab the person, you must hit "Y" rapidly to fill a meter, and then when it fills again hit "A" when it hits a certain zone. Its like a mix of old wrestling games and old golf games. Keep this procedure in mind for later.
Before I get into the story, let me mention the other stuff to do. You can run around fighting random crimes which gets old really fast and there's only about 10 crimes in the game: guys tagging stuff, guys looting, purse snatchers, guys fighting, drug dealers, guys running con games...ok maybe there's only 5. You can also play the con games like follow the queen (which is really easy) or dice games. Oh, and you can also search for drug stashes which unlock two special "rewards".
The rewards are: the original arcade NARC game which sucked then and sucks now (Its a simple side scroller and is awful) and a bonus mission in Asia, which I'm not certain doesn't get opened up anyway.
Spoilers in the next paragraph.
The story of NARC was written by an 8th or 9th grader. That's the only explanation as to why the game deals with adult themes yet is so far from the real world it might as well be Neverland. The game starts in the US where the cop and DEA officer somehow end up together. They both take orders from the local captain. Then they get transfered to Hong Kong. Then their boss from the US turns out to be the second in command criminal. Her father turns out to be the main guy and he of course has a giant transformer armed with rockets, grenades, and chainguns that they have to fight at the end.
I didn't make that last part up.
End Spoilers.
That doesn't end mention all of the ridiculously stupid cutscenes and their completely lack of continuity. Towards the end, speeches are given that make no sense. Its as if the writers knew the story, but forget that they had to fill us in. For example: a cutscene will play when you've completed missions, and quite often its only then when you'll find out what your mission was and what you accomplished. Bad, bad writing.
I won't even try to describe how the ending is explained.
NARC is entertaining is that GTA total freedom way, but its not a well made game.
There are a ton of other little details in the game, but they're too minor to mention. Although, I should mention that there are bugs galore and the camera system SUCKS as soon as you get close to a wall. Plus, some missions are really vague in their instructions. Sometimes you'll be told EXACTLY what to do, other times, you'll be guessing. I had to hit the web to finish one alternate mission as I did EXACTLY what I was told to do and couldn't beat the mission. It turns out I needed to do something not explained that I never would have guessed.
One more negative to point out is that the first half of the game is pretty standard and you'll have fun with it, but as soon as you get to Asia, the difficulty shoots way up. Most criminals in the US are easily wrestled down and put up little fight. In Asia as soon as you grab someone, you're usually in the air headed towards your back as they're tossing you around. Its ridiculous. It got to the point that I wouldn't show my badge, I'd just instantly attack criminals and stay on them until they stayed down, then I'd arrest them. Poor game design.
Overall, even at $20, I can't recommend this game for purchase. I rented it on a whim Friday night and here it is Saturday and I've already finished it. Had I stuck to the storyline I would've finished even sooner. At it should be noted that I only played two hours last night and today I was gone most of the day.
2 out of 10.
Had the developer spent more time on Q&A this score would've been a 6 despite the childish storyline.
NARC, its almost a lot of fun.