by:	October 07, 2005

FCK places you in the role of Crow, an undercover agent posing as a hitman. Walking the streets of a futuristic East-Asian metropolis your goal is to take down a drug cartel from the lieutenants all the way up to the kingpin. At the center of this intrigue is a new designer drug called Visual-Acid whose sale has allowed the gang’s power to grow immensely.

While details are somewhat scant, it appears that the story has you will have to use both your wits and your guns to accomplish what the designers call “the perfect hit”. Through paying informants, conducting stakeouts, intimidating your target’s associates and acquiring the proper tools of the trade Namco has promised a unique and open-ended experience. Ideally the game’s replay value will be extremely high, given the fact that one could conduct the same hit dozens of different ways.

Much attention should also be given to the world of FCK. While the hits themselves may sound like something out of the Hitman series, the world Namco is creating seems to share elements of GTA and Shenmue. Recently released screen captures and videos point to a promisingly large, detailed and interactive city with hundreds (perhaps thousands) of NPC’s milling about their daily. Frequent car swapping seems likely, as Namco has promised a ‘wide variety’ of vehicles to use as you journey about town. Day turning to night and real-time weather effects should add to the atmospheric nature of this title immensely.

The graphical prowess that is beginning to show itself can be attributed to Namco’s use of the Unreal 3 engine. Characters, so far, seem to be coming along nicely and the physics model promises the gamer a destructible environment. In screens of the build released to-date draw distance has not been an issue (i.e. no fog or noticeable pop-up) and the city itself looks quite impressive. One particular shot of a ‘time square-like’ area at night was particularly striking. Lights from the giant marquee’s in the area cast remarkable color onto the characters and surrounding environment providing the viewer with an exciting display of powerful visuals.

One criticism thus far seems to be the enemy A.I. The video’s we’ve seen contained seemingly mindless enemies that were unaware of the hundreds of bullets Crow was spraying into their comrades. A.I., however, is often one of the later features to be implemented as developers often concentrate more on getting the visuals and control-scheme stable. As we’ve seen recently (i.e. Perfect Dark Zero) often enemy A.I. will simply be turned off altogether for demos. That, combined with the fact that this is Namco we’re talking about, means that we should expect those issues to be squared away by the time FCK releases.

Of all the launch window titles for the 360, FCK seems to be one that has not gotten a great deal of hype and/or interest from the great majority of the gaming public. However if Namco can combine the ability to perform extremely creative contracts (i.e. Hitman) with an immersive lifelike metropolis (i.e. GTA and Shenmue) this could be a dark-horse system seller when it is released, sometime during the launch-period.

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