Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole on the enduring appeal of humble licensed tie-ins
There is a long and, let us charitably say, mixed history of videogames based on films and TV series. Notoriously, hundreds of thousands of unsold cartridges of Atari’s 1983 ET game were buried in the New Mexico desert, but people who grew up playing games in that decade will also recall some surprising successes. The 1986 homecomputer game of James Cameron’s film Aliens, for example, cleverly foregrounded the horror of watching the remote biosensors of team members flatline as they were killed off-screen, and pioneered many of the rhythms of the modern survival-horror genre.
These days, of course, there is Netflix and the rest, and a popular multi-season streaming TV drama is arguably a stronger IP than almost any single film. So what if you’ve binge-watched the latest season of your favourite show and would like to spend some more time in that universe while you wait for the next? It will, of course, depend on the genre. I’m not sure how a videogame of Succession, the ultra-black comedy about a Murdoch-style media family, would work, primarily because it doesn’t contain any superheroes or much shooting. Zombie-apocalypse fiction, on the other hand, is rich material, hence Telltale’s critically acclaimed The Walking Dead series, though that was not the game of the TV series but the game of their mutual source, the comics.
As a fan of Narcos (even more of the spinoff, Narcos: Mexico), then, I was primed to enjoy Narcos: Rise Of The Cartels, which turns out to be one of those games with a bad Metacritic score but which you might well like if you like that sort of thing. The sort of thing I like is planning deliberately to shoot people, and not being too stressed by demands for lightning-quick reflexes or an unreasonably limited clock, so a turn-based strategy game seemed like just the ticket.
The game’s tone is evident very early on, as serious-voiced DEA men scurry around a pleasingly isometric town and look in buildings that handily have transparent roofs and walls, before noticing a low-level soldier of the cartel hanging around suspiciously on the street. “Take him in for questioning,” the commander orders over the radio, before adding sympathetically, “but take him down if necessary”. Since the mission rubric in the top-left corner of the screen immediately changes to “neutralise the target”, it seems that questioning is not, after all, really the priority. Shooting is. Obviously it’s above my pay grade to wonder whether this is really a sensible strategy, and whether the hapless dealer who is soon dead from a surgical shotgun blast to the face might in fact have told us something useful if we had simply asked nicely.
So it goes. While Narcos the TV series adds moral complexity and shades of grey to the old DEA-vs-cartel story, Narcos the videogame is just about planning ambushes, or surviving them, in an oddly relaxing way. Indeed there is something intensely chilled about a turn-based game like this – just potter around with your cursor, then sit back and watch what happens – that fits better with the comfort of TV-watching than any fast-paced twitch game does. Indeed, the process of scrolling through your watchlist on Netflix or Prime is, as we all know, a form of mindless entertainment in itself that can easily last as long as an episode of something you can’t be bothered to watch: in this sense it is the turn-based minigame that precedes the narrative payoff of finally pressing play.
Narcos: Rise Of The Cartels is not going to win any awards, but it fits solidly into the long history of perfectly fine movie or TV adaptations, even if it’s not quite as thrilling as, say, the ZX Spectrum game of Cobra, the film in which Sylvester Stallone wears mirrored aviators and a very long black trenchcoat in order to seem taller while shooting people. Narcos is particularly good, though, on atmosphere: there is some excellent ambient sound design going on, and the feeling of an uneasily quiet street in a hostile town – that chewy suspense before everything explodes in gunfire and shouting – is something it absolutely nails.
For a moment it made me want a game of an even better Netflix series, the brutal Israeli counterterrorism thriller Fauda – but then, while Latin America is still considered a suitable fictional playground by the videogame industry, the Gaza Strip isn’t. There is an implicit ranking of geopolitical suffering in such decisions that deserves questioning. That cartel soldier round the corner, though? Let’s just shoot him.
A popular multi-season streaming TV drama is arguably a stronger IP than almost any single film