The Shield should probably have never been released

The Shield should probably have never been released. That might sound like an overly harsh statement for a game that isn't abysmally broken, but take this fact into account: Six months ago, The Shield was sitting comfortably on the shelf of game development purgatory, seemingly canned after original publisher Sammy decided to stop publishing games. For some reason, Aspyr then swooped in and rescued this beleaguered licensed action game and put it out for all to buy. Unless Aspyr picked up the rights to this game for less than a dollar and a dream, then the investment was for naught. The Shield is a completely uninteresting brawler/shooter that tries desperately to grasp at the kinds of brutal straws that just about every other mean-spirited action game of the last five years has already used up and spit out. Of course, the main draw here is that the game is based on the popular FX cops-with-bad-attitudes show The Shield, but apart from some competent voice talent and a script full of swears, this game has barely an inkling of what makes the show so much fun to watch. 

 

Much the way that games like 24: The Game and Alias tried to squeeze themselves into the lexicon of the shows they were based on by providing a storyline that took place in between certain episodes or seasons of the show, The Shield plants itself firmly post-third season, but pre-Glenn Close and Forrest Whittaker. The fallout from the money train robbery has already taken place, and Detective Vic Mackey (played by Michael "Commish" Chiklis) and his strike team of dirty cops are on the verge of disbanding. The brass wants them reassigned, members of the team are unhappy with the way things are going, and the captain tells them it's going to take a major bust to salvage any hope of keeping the team alive. The big bust in question turns out to be an arms race between the Byz-Lat and One-Niner gangs. Mackey is tasked with breaking up the battle, finding the guns, and arresting as many of the thugs in charge as possible.

To the game's credit, certain aspects do play a bit like an episode of the show, but they play too much like an episode that has been hopelessly stretched well beyond reason. The case involving the gangbangers and their caches of weaponry is pretty dull after a short while--so dull, in fact, that the scriptwriters went out of their way to have the strike-team guys constantly remind the audience of why what they're doing matters. Variations of the line "We crack this case, and the team is saved!" appear so often that you have to wonder if the writers started forgetting what they'd written previously and were too lazy to go back and read through the script. While you get a few nice bits of foul-mouthed banter between the strike-team members and some of the criminal elements throughout the script, too much of the story is geared toward forcing the characters into situations that border on parody of the types of gritty scenarios you'd see on the show. It's as though someone at the developer felt the need to take every single possible opportunity to have Vic and crew do something dirty, even if it was completely inconsequential to the main story arc. And the dirty stuff hardly seems all that dirty.