Pros:
-made by people wanting to do a traditional console game on the DS instead of doing some lame "DS style" game
-fully streaming 3D city with many landmarks, and pretty constant framerate, except when traveling over bridges. the buildings have a nice distant draw distance, and cars, objects and more have plenty of draw distance for you to avoid them and notice them
-lots of traffic(for better or worse, it's still and impressive aspect)
-fantastic perspective in driving, 3rd person moving, and 2nd person shooting
-near flawless controls, actual easy aiming for a ds shooter game
-awesome music, and realistic ambient city track
-varied mission design
-sub-missions, photo locations, busing blocks, and timer medals are great additional to the main quests to complete
-high speed car chases, drifting, traffic dodging, and even some car physics
-well modeled characters
-FANTASTIC textures, and great animation for the main character
Cons:
-whenever you need or want to restart a mission, you often restart in the exact location in the center of the city, and you need to reach your destination, go through any conversation, and try the mission again. the game should just start you back off from when you start to control your character and you need to accomplish the mission.
-cars are pretty much immovable. you really want to avoid hitting cars, as they will stop all of your momentum and you must then accellerate back to speed. this also applies to your car. your car should maintain momentum, deflect, and perhaps flip upon hitting other cars or immovable objects, like immovable trees and phone booths(bus stops?). this really hurts your ability to chase after people. starsky and hutch for consoles actually had much less traffic than in this game.
-some aspects of the game should be automated, which conflict with controlling the game. while switching from buttons to stylus and back is not much of a pain, the game makes you use some awkward controls when it is not the most convenient, text, which can be skipped with the R button, could have easily been put on the primary B button or the A button, when, usually, the rest of the buttons are disabled during text.
-cars drift automatically, as if the hand brake is always on. I should be able to drift if I accelerate, turn, and brake/reverse, like in most other driving games. this is even worse on the flash back stages, which commonly (if not always) take place in the middle of winter, when drifting is even less controllable.
-the game has a nice car physics engine for going off of jumps, this feels unused, as there are very few places in the city, outside of missions, when you ever make your car jump. I just feel that there needs to be random ramps all across the city.
-shooting, while intuitive and well implemented, is unrefined in other aspects. to shoot enemies, you must be within a particular distance, at which point you can aim at their body and shoot. while this aspect feels somewhat abnormal, it is not why shooting is flawed. within the range of shooting enemies, the enemies also are withing shooting distance of you, and they never miss. so instead of fights where you have to dodge bullets and shoot the enemy, you can simply walk up to them and take turns shooting him, as it becomes more of a waiting game than anything else, as he has less health and will die before you do, unless you are overrun by enemies somehow. the engine for shooting seems like it would do great for other shooting games, as long as the enemies can miss you.
-the sub missions that happen while driving across the city are announced to you via radio. due to the length of the radio message, and how this concept works, the event will always be a block behind the direction you are currently driving. while it is only slightly annoying if you want to do sub missions and have to turn around each time, it really just detracts from the want of people to do sub missions. I may very well choose to do a quick chase if the opportunity presented itself, but it happens to present itself much too late
-all of your actions are completely legal. you can stop any car in the middle of the road, any at all, commandeer it(i suppose) and drive away. you can crash into any policeman and they don't care, you're a cop too, i guess. but I feel that you might need to be punished for your crimes, like in GTA games.
-I wish I could run over civilians, shoot them or other characters, outside of enemies. but I cant, and civilians simply run away screaming.
so overall, this game is very fun to play, and it looks fantastic, as these developers actually knew how to make a game with good aspects, and they really pushed the limits of what has been developed on the DS before it. there are some minor aspects that I would have changed, but I completely enjoy the experience I get from the game.
