Interview by: Brandon Cackowski-Schnell

After years of open world famine on the Nintendo DS, 2009 sees the release of not just one sandbox shooter, but two of them. Earlier in the year we saw Rockstar's take on the genre with GTA: Chinatown Wars and this fall brings the release of C.O.P. The Recruit, a new open world IP from Ubisoft. and VD-Dev.

The game tackles the sandbox genre from the other side of the law, placing you in the driver's seat as Dan Miles, a former street racer turned police officer who is tasked with investigating a possible terrorist threat as well as solving the framing of his mentor. Quite a bit to expect out of a rookie. The game takes place in a 3-D recreation of New York City and features a third person perspective as you tear around, and tear up the city.

GameShark.com recently spoke to Nouredine Abboud, Senior Producer and Co-Director of C.O.P. The Recruit about the pitfalls of the sandbox genre on the Nintendo DS, just how big the game's virtual New York City is and why Liberty City residents will want to take a bite out of the Big Apple.

VD-Dev has had a lot of technical success with their driving engine on Nintendo handhelds, but with the amount of content in C.O.P. The Recruit, honestly the DS isn't the first handheld platform that comes to mind. What is it about the DS that makes it the platform of choice for the game?

The DS is the best platform for what we wanted to accomplish with C.O.P. The Recruit. We set out to make an open-world game with access to a lot of police / city-control tools, and [without] the DS it would have been a different game. Without a DS we could not have used the stylus, the microphone and the dual-screen, which are key to our gameplay. Also, we wanted to address the number one issue of a lot of open-world games encounter, the lack of purpose. We looked at other open-world games and found that a lot of time, players end up wandering the city without much purpose. So we wanted to have a faster pace, which is great for portable games since players often have less time to play them.

The game is billed as an open-world action adventure so can you explain just how open the world is? Is the entire map open from the beginning? Is travel limited to street level or can Dan enter any building he wants?

The whole city is open, without any loading time, not even on the bridges. But you can only enter the buildings that are linked to missions. We thought this was the best of both worlds: fully open environment for the driving and city-gameplay with closed maps for inside action-adventure missions.

Is the New York City of the game a miniaturized version of the real city or does the six square miles in the game represent a small chunk of the Big Apple?

It’s kind of a miniaturized version, with the key landmarks (Times Square, Yankee Stadium, North Hudson Park, etc…). We did our best to keep things accurate, while taking creative liberties here and there to make the city more fun for crazy driving.

The controls appear to switch between the face buttons and stylus controls. Is there an option to stick with one over another for those that find switching between the two cumbersome? If not, how does the game minimize the awkwardness inherent in going between using buttons and using a stylus?

The game gives you the best control options for each gameplay situation. Instead of having one control system, we've gone for something tailored to the player’s needs as they play the game. We made sure that when you go from one control to the other it is always done smoothly at the right moment of the game: driving mode when you enter a car, stylus mode when you draw out your gun, etc. The game is organized so that the situations when you change control schemes are balanced to avoid any clumsyness.