Miami Vice

Who would've thunk it? Apparently the new Miami Vice movie is actually half-decent, a huge shock for those of us who sat through The Dukes of Hazzard or Starsky & Hutch in recent times. It's almost enough to make us look forward to the much-touted Knight Rider remake that's in the works. Almost.

Anyway, this new Miami Vice mobile game is based on the movie – so no Don Johnson or pastel sports jackets in sight. It takes the form of an Operation Wolf style shooting game where you move your target up, down, left and right, and press '5' to shoot drug smugglers as they pop up from the scenery.

The basic mechanics of the main game are simple enough: battle through each level without getting killed. Your health is shown at the top of the screen, along with your remaining time and the number of enemies you have left to dispatch.

At the end of each mission, you're scored according to how many you hit, how much health and time you had left at the end, and your overall accuracy. Cartoon pics link everything together (a shame there's no stills from the movie) and there are seven missions to play through, along with a 'hidden' mini-game level that's so secret, you're told how to access it in the instructions.

The problem with Miami Vice is that it's brainless. That might not be a problem in a blockbuster movie – in fact, it's often an advantage – but here it makes for a repetitive game that numbs your thumbs without engaging your grey matter.

The scenery does change between missions, taking in street scenes, boats, saloon bars, and even a helicopter. But within each mission, the enemies are far too samey, if not identical. For example, the first level will have you wondering if EVERY drug dealer in Miami walks around bare-chested in blue jeans, and it goes on from there.

More of a problem is the gameplay mechanic itself. It's arguable that Operation Wolf style sniper games simply don't work well on a mobile keypad, having been squeezed down from something that was originally played with a gun controller on an arcade machine.

Aiming and shooting is too fiddly, and that's not sour grapes because we couldn't do it. Honest. In fact, with three Continues, it's too easy to motor straight through in one sitting, with little incentive to replay it, even to beat your high score.

In many ways, Miami Vice suffers from the same faults that blighted Shaun Of The Dead, another shooty movie tie-in released earlier this year. In the cinema, Miami Vice may be much better than expected, but as a mobile game it's much like star Colin Farrell's bedroom skills as alleged in this week's tabloids: underwhelming, repetitive, and over way too soon.

Miami Vice

Short but neither sharp or shocking
Score
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)