Crime Life Gang Wars

Crime Life - Gang Wars (2005/PC/ENG)
Year: 2005 l Platform: PC l Language: English l Developer: Hothouse Creations l Publisher: Konami l 2.92 GB
Genre: Modern Action / Adventure

Crime Life: Gang Wars tells the story of a dude named Tre. Tre's a new member of the Outlawz, a once-powerful street gang that seems to have fallen on hard times, while its main rival, the Headhunterz, is flourishing. You can tell they're "from tha streetz" by the way they use a "z" instead of an "s" in their names. You'll take on the role of Tre and work on earning some rep in the neighborhood by getting in organized street fights, sticking up jewelry stores, shoplifting, and all types of ill business.

While the list of options might sound appealing, one is barely different from the next, and the core of the game is a very awful beat-'em-up with a few practically meaningless squad commands that you can use to order your followers around. Sometimes rival gangs will pile up into a mess of swinging limbs and weapons that showcase the game's bad artificial intelligence and ugly animation. Sometimes you'll get to go one-on-one with a guy and witness firsthand the horror of the game's busted fighting system. Regardless of the situation, the gameplay is uniformly bad. You're given two attacks, a block, and a modifier button that lets you use a portion of an easy-to-fill adrenaline meter to bust out special attacks that do more damage. You can press two buttons together to execute a throw, which is funny-looking because the enemies fly away from you as though you were tossing an empty cardboard box. When you've beaten an enemy down to a sufficiently low level, a skull appears over his head.

This is a mission-based game, and as you complete missions, you'll see cutscenes, both prerendered and in-engine, that attempt to move the story along. But you're never given any solid motivation to proceed. The ugly character models look even worse up close, and the prerendered cutscenes don't look much better. The leaders of the rival gang are played by five of the six members of D-12 (Eminem must have been busy recording voice-over for 50 Cent: Bulletproof that afternoon), but you'd be hard pressed to identify most of them, because there isn't much voice from them in the game, and the awful character models don't look anything like the real-life D-12.