The cast is diverse but follows the cop movie formula. There is the chief of the police division, the mentor/old cop who now works a desk/gun cage (in this instance faithfully voice acted by Christopher Walken), the untrusting female partner defending her abilities as a police officer, and of course the annoying and constantly barraging FBI agent in charge of the case but which you ignore utterly. Along with Christopher Walken in this game is Gary Oldman, who voices the FBI agent as well as a Russian mob boss. The narrator is Christopher Walken in his role as George the old cop.

The character of Nick Kang is one you'll either hate or love, but probably love, with his repertoire of one-liners and comebacks. 'Gotta do this…ninja style' or 'You have the right to soak in your own urine' are some of the more memorable. Nick Kang is off to solve the problems facing the city and find out what happened to his father many years ago, a cop who was fingered for drug trafficking before mysteriously disappearing. As you progress through the campaign, you have a good cop/bad cop rating which determines which of the three paths to the game ending you take. Good cop points are awarded for arresting criminals and killing really bad guys. Bad cop points are awarded for things like running over or shooting people.

As you cruise the city the dispatch alerts you to crimes happening in your area, which you can solve if you wish. A crime can be anything from stopping a couple fighting, catching a mugger, ending a gang war or chasing down a truck filled with stolen Activision games (the dispatch points out the cargo is very important and that the truck should not be overly damaged). Upon approaching a crime scene you can flash your badge, fire a warning shot into the air, or just start shooting, based on your assessment of the people involved.

Beside cop points, solving crimes grants you badge points. For every hundred you get a badge which can be exchanged at 24/7 centres throughout the city to earn upgrades. An upgrade at a shooting range might get you a the ability to precision aim (being able to choose to shoot in the arms, legs or head rather than just filling a target with bullets), while an upgrade at the driving school allows you to perform tricks with your car, like turning on the spot when taking off. An upgrade at a dojo grants new martial arts moves, like back techniques and body slams for use in the numerous Kung Fu sequences. To earn these upgrades you have to perform trials, a shooting range involving the shooting of targets in the range, the driving school involving navigating an obstacle course without destroying too many obstacles and the dojo involving beating up dummies.

The campaign is divided into episodes, and there are about five to seven in each ending path. Each episode is divided into missions and cut scenes, usually about seven in total, and a mission can be a shootout, car race, tailing mission, infiltration, martial arts sequence or a simple drive-to-location objective. In the drive-to missions you can cruise about the city for as long as you want before going to the designated location, while the others have to be solved before moving on.

A personal favourite was the infiltration missions were you had to maneuvre through a building to a certain area, avoiding being seen on the way. As there are inevitably patrolling guards everywhere you have to neutralise them on the way, and you could do this the good cop or the bad cop way. The good cop used tranquiliser darts or a swift chop to the head with a punch or a kick, while the bad cop kicked out the legs and then broke the neck. For efficiency there is nothing like walking up behind a casually smoking guard, putting a foot in the back of his knee and grabbing his chin and forehead in your hands before snapping him like so much tinder, then lowering the body gently to the floor.

The mouse controls the camera and this can be irritating when you have to turn swiftly or maneuvre carefully between objects that will give away your position. There is also a lot of keys in the game, for things like flashing your badge or frisking pedestrians, all of which can take a while to get used to. Things like finishing moves in martial arts are performed by learning key combinations, which may or may not be your cup of tea. The aimed shot mode with your guns can be frustrating to use, but this is compensated for by the slow-motion shooting leaps and rolls you can make by holding down the both mouse buttons, almost Matrix-style.

Apart from the aforementioned Snoop Dog, different game file names change the appearance of your character, including a smoking donkey as seen in one of the screens. Other than this there is little replay value - even shooting muggers in the kneecaps gets tiring after a while. As a bonus there are five multiplayer modes, including Dojo Master and Car Race, which are exactly what they sound like, but innovative enough to be more than mere novelties.

The game features liberal travel across a vast city, missions for various characters, stealing cars (commandeering them for the good of the city) and gunfights. The city is essentially limited to the streets and pretty scenery - no car parks to drive up or hidden alleys here. For that matter, no buildings to peruse either, except for the dojos and shooting ranges.

The city is a faithful recreation of a portion of Los Angeles, whose vastness helps make up a bit for linearity. If it were to be compared to GTA3, the drivable space is approximately just a little smaller than all three islands of Liberty City put together. You can quite literally drive for ten minutes in a fast car in a single direction on the highway without running out of town, and that's without smashing the cars in your way like a macabre destruction derby.

The graphics are lacklustre, of the sort some readers may remember from Enter the Matrix. This results in the scenery, except for a few notable exceptions, being badly rendered and usually in few colours, and the characters looking like walking cadavers at the lowest resolutions and people affected with the plague at the highest. This is unfortunate as the many cut scenes in the game often close up on the blotchy, smeared faces. One aspect that the engine performs well in is the martial art sequences, much like Enter the Matrix, and general character and car animation which is fluid and well animated, whether fast in the midst of kung fu or slow when sneaking up behind a cigarette-smoking guard.

The story is short despite having three different endings and can be finished by a good player who doesn't spend too much time cruising the city within a day, in all its variations. The good ending took the longest to get, and the bad ending sequence could be finished by an avid player in under an hour. If a player chooses to search for the only thing resembling completion quests, similar to hidden packages in GTA, then he could possibly play for a week as the "doggy bones" all thirty of them, are scattered on streets throughout the city. There are over several hundred streets and the final reward of collecting all the bones is the dubious honour of playing as Snoop Dog.

However, all this said the game had many good points that make it well worth playing, however briefly. Ignoring the graphics and the linearity of the city the storyline and the characters were well thought out. The story is admittedly short, but then after playing it it is hard to imagine how Luxuflux could have made it longer. The voice acting was professionally done and quite excellent, in an appropriately cliched way, and the animation of the actors was movie quality, even if their skins were the result of some evil ploy by the God of Bad Graphics. It felt like a movie and the missions involved were short enough to almost be like the accompanying action sequences.