Escape from Paradise City

Format PC

Developer

Publisher CDV

Genre Action, Sim / Strategy

3 Comments

Here's the deal: things have gone to shit in Paradise City. Crime is rife, gang bosses run amok and there's even whispers of supernatural terrors walking the streets.

Naturally the government wants to sweep the roads clean with a giant metaphorical broom, and decides to fight crime with crime - it pulls three criminals from prison, turns them into agents - kind of like the premise of the Luc Besson film Nikita - and drops them into the city to sort things out through use brain power, brawn, guns and henchmen.

The thing is, what the three chosen criminals actually want to do is escape from the confines of the city and the mess - hence the name of the game. Will they succeed? Only by playing will you find out...

Escape from Paradise City is an action-RTS-RPG hybrid and at its heart lies the battle for control of territory. The storyline's spread over 16 chapters with you switching between control of the three unique 'agents' - each agent gets their own set of chapters - and to boil it down to its bare bones the ultimate goal in each chapter is to take over a handful of the city's 100-plus neighbourhoods by subverting the local crime boss.

Neighbourhood control is where the game's resource element comes into play. Once you've taken command of a territory, you're invariably rewarded with money, power and trait points. Money, unsurprisingly, can be used to purchase equipment and weapons, power is used to 'call' on special abilities such as air strikes - well, you are playing government agents after all - while traits are used to develop the main characters.

In addition to having RPG-like attributes, each of the three agents has trait trees - think World of Warcraft's talent trees - to boost and fine tune abilities, certain traits unlocking skills that can be combined with each character's four combat styles to produce enhanced results. For example, combine the skill Leg Shot with Burst Shot, and you can shoot multiple enemies in the legs and cripple their movement speed.

The way you experience Escape from Paradise City's combat depends on which of the two available ways you play the game. Developer Sirius Games has opted to include a Strategy mode - which is pretty much like playing a traditional RTS - and Street Mode, which drops you into a third-person viewpoint.

It's not an action-shooter in Street Mode, however. In keeping with the RPG theme, the combat works in a similar way to traditional role-playing games and MMOs.

The inclusion of an RPG element also means that players can pick up random quests from NPCs during the course of the game, and that you're able to loot the corpses of enemies left on the sidewalk in the wake of your attempts to clean up the streets.

Paradise City itself is a gritty, urban sprawl where steam bursts through road vents and pedestrians and vehicles continually tread and drive alongside the seedier criminal element. Sirius says it felt it extremely important to create a city that looks alive, and to this end you'll always see movement, with the sun rising and lowering making the transition from day to night for the environment.

Somehow we can't see the game ever winning any awards for visuals, but Sirius has opted for an art style for the city's buildings and streets that reflects Escape from Paradise City's gritty theme - which is clever use of its available resources, really.

In fact, Sirius says that its main resource is ideas, and has pumped its game full of these. Of course, the question is whether those ideas link up to form a cohesive whole or have simply been included to create numerous gameplay features, which may not slot together. We hope to discover it's the former.

Stuart Bishop