Crime Life: Gang Wars
I do say, chap. We wear our colours in the proverbial “hood”!
Tags: Crime Life: Gang Wars Categories: Reviews, Xbox Reviews
Posted by Jake McNeill on Feb 6th, 2006
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Crime Life: Gang Wars (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Fighting | No | ||
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I am so very sick of “gangsta’” games. Oh, it’s not that I’m averse to the topic matter. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was a solid game, and even dating back to the NES days games like River City Ransom married themes of gang warfare with great gameplay. Unfortunately, the gangsta’ thing has become the new WWII in videogames, in that titles like these are a dime a dozen, most are completely lacking originality, and only a select few are any damn good.
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Crime Life: Gang Wars represents the epitome of this trend. Not that it’s the worst of these games, although it is pretty bad, but rather because it represents everything that’s so wrong about the genre. There’s little depth to the gameplay, and the game’s creators seem to think that the violence will compensate for this (it doesn’t). There’s little depth to the story, and the game’s creators seem to think that intentionally poor grammar will at least lend the game some authenticity (it doesn’t). And perhaps most famously of all, the games creators seem to think that after listening to a few rap CDs and watching a few episodes of Chappelle’s Show, they’ve become experts on gangsta’ culture (they aren’t).
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Okay, so by now the game’s use of the word “colours” has become infamous, but is it really all that bad? You have no idea. In the game’s opening fight, spectators could be heard doing the Arsenio Hall “Whoo whoo whoo!”, when you first meet the leader of your gang, he questions your skills by saying “Outlawz are like fine silk… what happens if people find some nasty-ass polyester in with the silk?”, and the game is filled with so many laughably bad stabs at gang stereotypes (must everything end with a “Z”?) that this is the classic example of a bunch of company executives trying to market a product based on a fad they know obviously nothing about.
…. Okay, one more before I move on. The game has a Beverly Hills-esque area called “Blingsley Hills”, that the game describes by saying “The money is literally dripping from the walls here”, proving that not only do the game’s writers fail at recreating the gangsta’ atmosphere, they also fail at the English language. It’sfiguratively dripping from the walls, not “literally”!
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Things get worse from there. The gameplay is repetitive and broken. While the game tries to dress up your actions in unique trappings like shoplifting and robberies, it essentially all boils down to the brawler combat, which uses only two types of punches, a block, and a throw button that can be used for special attacks and fatalities when combines with the other buttons. Generally, combat boils down to working your way to the outside of a crowd of enemies, picking out one on the fringes, alternating punching him a few times and blocking, and delivering a fatality when his health is low again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Sure, you can get some melee weapons and firearms, but melee weapons all break and firearms fun dry, so you’ll be back to brawling soon enough.
In that respect, and combined with the crowds of people, this game kinda’ becomes a poor man’s State of Emergency, albeit without the colorful locales and wide variety of weapons. And considering that most found that title to be kinda’ shallow to begin with, you kinda’ get the idea how quickly Crime Life becomes boring and repetitive.
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The game’s graphics are an absolute joke, at times seemingly no better than a PSOne game with the N64’s smear filter. Character models are blocky and ugly looking, character animations are pathetic, environments are sparse, textures are bland and blurry, and even the framerate shudders if there are too many people onscreen, which is particularly pathetic because that’s a large part of what the game is about. The lighting is bad, the camera is only barely useable, there are little graphical problems to be found everywhere (shadows from clouds can be seen both indoors and at night, for example). If there was ever a contest for ugliest Xbox game ever made, Crime Life would be a finalist.
As for the game’s much-advertised use of members of the rap group D-12… well, I haven’t really seen much of them. And as far as the soundtrack goes, what little I ever heard of it was completely unmemorable. And don’t even bother asking about the voice acting. The game’s writing is enough of a joke without these clowns saying it.
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All told, the game’s atmosphere is so bad I’d almost be tempted to suspect this game was a parody, if the gameplay wasn’t also bad enough to match. This game fails on every level, but then, perhaps it was never meant to succeed to begin with. As with most other gangsta’ games, it seems that this one was released simply to take advantage of the “gangsta’” craze. Sure, the $20 price tag may look tempting, but that’s $20 you could be spending on State of Emergency, or at least putting towards GTA: San Andreas.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
| + Uhh... it's from da' hood! No, really! | 3.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
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- Horrible graphics that would have looked kinda' bad ten years ago - Bad camera - Extremely repetitive gameplay - Laughable writing and hilariously stupid presentation |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| This game is so bad that simply playing it will make your IQ drop a few pointz… er, points. | |
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Tags: Crime Life: Gang Wars
Posted by Jake McNeill on Feb 6th, 2006 and is filed under Reviews, Xbox Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
