Crime Life: Gang Wars Review

4.0

Format PlayStation 2

Developer Konami

Publisher Konami

Genre Action, Adventure

What is Konami famous for? Well, there's the Pro Evo Soccer series and the Metal Gear Solid games for a start - both of them fully paid-up members of the PlayStation2 A-list. So what went wrong here?

Let's be honest. This is clearly nothing more than a lazy, bandwagon-jumping urban gangster affair. Its best hope of finding its way off the shelves of your local game shop is by ensnaring short-sighted grannies who think they're buying Grand Theft Auto for a young relative.

Allow us to elaborate. For a start, the camera movement is so slow that by the time you can see who's beating the living hell out of you, you're already flat on your back and leaking life-giving fluids all over the pavement.

The brawling itself consists of mad, desperate bouts of swinging fists and frenzied stamping. At the end of it you'll hopefully have taken down some rivals, but it's hard to tell in the thick of it. As the game progresses, there's the opportunity to learn new, ever more brutal death moves. At this point the combat starts to become more satisfying, but until then the fights are hit and miss.

Rival gang members crawl the streets looking for action, and each different area has its own distinct atmosphere, but the impression of a real, living, breathing city is shattered by the fact that all the traffic on the streets consists of just two types of car: the pink saloon in the screen above and another van.

With a cumbersome camera that severely limits what you see and do in any given situation, and hazy mission objectives, all the game's tension comes in the form of tooth-gnashing frustration. If you're looking for a bit of bad-boy street action, divert your gaze towards the far superior 50 Cent: Bulletproof.

PSW Staff