The plot is incredibly simplistic. You play police office Jack Slate, a cop who’s been sent a ransom note from a mysterious gang that says they’re going to kill their female hostage if their demands aren’t meant. It’s your job to, not mediate and find a solution to the crisis, but instead to kill anyone who looks at you funny. With your dog Shadow at your side, that’s just what you set out to do.

You go from roughly similar looking location to the next, killing anything that moves. Shadow is very useful as you can sick him on your targets to take them down instantly; something, oddly enough, your guns cannot do. Shadow needs some time to recoup his energy, so you can only use him every couple of minutes or so. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the AI is so inept that you can simply stand in one place, wait for Shadow to be ready, and kill the next target. Repeating this process over and over, while not the most thrilling, is the safest…and that’s not playing cheap, that’s good police work!

But that method does get tiresome very quickly and is only useful for getting out of jams. This is where your guns come into play. You have an extensive arsenal of weapons available to you and can also pick up your enemy’s weapons after you take them down. It seems that, especially later in the game, most of the enemies have extensive body armor on. This means that it takes anywhere from 5 to 30 bullets from some weapons to take them out. This not only makes you just want to sit and wait for Shadow to kill them, also means you’re constantly having to worry about your limited ammunition.

One incentive to get you to take out the bad guys, rather then letting Shadow do it, is bullet time. The more people you kill, the more you build up this meter that lets you do fantastic dives while shooting enemies with pin-point accuracy—all in slow motion! This is actually somewhat fun, but the novelty wears off rather quickly.

Killing enemies wouldn’t be so tedious if there was more then a handful of enemies to shoot. Apparently, all the gangs in the city use the same tailor and all have matching masks. Some of them do carry different weaponry, but as I said above, the AI is so lacking that they rarely know how to use their fire power to shoot a brick wall, let alone try to scare super-cop Jack Slate.

The monotony is only broken up by the serious frustration that is the camera which makes you want to simply turn the game off. You can auto target enemies, which locks the camera on to them, but you have to be able to see them in order to do this. Sadly, you cannot actually control the camera and are left to rely on its drunken control to follow you and the action. This wouldn’t be so bad if you can at least re-center the camera behind you, but this is not an option. You just hope that the drunk camera operator manages to show you what it is you need to see before you die.

In case you can’t tell, I didn’t like this game. I wanted to. I wanted to find a fun shooter that would keep me entertained while in the doctor’s waiting room or on the bus. I didn’t expect a game with a lot of depth, but I also didn’t expect a mind numbingly repetitive gameplay experience, either. I am sure that there are people out there who will enjoy this game—they wouldn’t have made two console titles and now this PSP title if there weren’t. I’m simply not in that group, I guess.