Crime Life: Gang Wars centres around a rather lowly scumbag by the name of Tre, who decides to join the Outlawz after realising he’s good for little else outside of theft and violence. The Outlawz main rivals are the Headhunterz, a group with equally bad grammatical skills and respect for authority, who’ve just happened to deal a rather large blow to the Outlawz, who’ve fallen on hard times. After being recruited by his cousin (or cuz, an obvious nod to the Crips, a notorious LA-based gang), Tre gets to participate in a range of sleazy activities, starting with street fights and odd jobs for an ageing barber, to more despicable duties such as turf wars and standoffs with the cops, basically until the Outlawz have control of the ‘hood once again.
Most "gangstas" keep a firm grip on their wood at all times
The game is mission based like just about every other free roaming game on the market – basically, your aim is to earn a lot of money, earn a better reputation, get a big gang following for Tre, and take out the members of rival gangs, each of whom are a member of the rap group D12 (though their most famous member, Eminem is missing from the game, which is a massive blow). To do so, you’ll have to trudge through an endless amount of dull missions and wrestle with the games extremely basic, yet unresponsive control system, keeping in mind that Crime Life lacks all of the variation and gameplay progression of other recent freeform and beat ‘em up titles release recently – you can’t customise movesets, you’ve got a very limited variety of missions and you’re stuck on foot for the entire game. It doesn’t help that you’ve got to constantly jump between areas on subway trains, and your objectives are clearly explained.
The October release of The Warriors by Rockstar set a new yard stick for which all other beat ‘em up games are going to be measured – Crime Life comes across as being more of a clone of Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance, yet manages to offer even less than Capcom’s somewhat dull button masher, which is really quite stupid. Hand to hand and weapon combat is controller by a quick attack and a heavy attack button, which can be linked for a very limited amount of combos. Tre has a special attack meter which charges up with regular attacks – combinations of two buttons execute the special attack. There’s a special combo attack that can be triggered by a combination of two presses of the Y button followed by one of the others. Finally, when you’ve dealt enough damage to your opponent, you can land a finishing move. There’s a ton of these finishing moves, and while one or two of them look alright, many of them are completely stupid (who’s going to die from an arm bar submission move, seriously?) and you’re eventually going to get sick of seeing the same action after the 500th enemy, not to mention the characters’ attitude of “I can kill anyone because I’m so street, yo.”
"What, did I turn up to a Klan rally in a Boy George outfit?"
Many freeform games are defined by their reward structure – Grand Theft Auto games let your player go to new locations with new vehicles, Beat Down gave you all sorts of new weapons and moves…but Crime Life offers absolute no incentive whatsoever to trudge through the game’s utterly pitiful gameplay. Eventually you’re going to get a gang to follow you around, but they’re devoid of anything remotely resembling artificial intelligence, and your control over them is quite limited, with only four basic commands available.
To make matters worse, Crime Life’s presentation is just as bad as the underlying gameplay. The menu system is unremarkable, but the game features some really terrible cutscenes, both pre-rendered and real time that are meant to assist in the game’s plot progression. Crime Life is one of the ugliest games this year, with ridiculously simple, blocky models and extremely dull environments with terribly low quality texturing all around; those of you who are particularly observant might even notice texture bouncing, which was a very common problem in the early days of the PSOne – an era with which Crime Life’s graphics share a lot in common. The game’s camera is a real pain in the but to use – the main perspective is fairly zoomed out to start with; things look bad enough at this distance, but as you get closer…well, try to hang on to your lunch. On top of all of this, the game can’t even hold a respectable framerate.
Gimme all of your flat, blurry, textured bling or I'll shoot!
With appearances from five of the six members of the D12 group, you’d at least expect that the rappers would have licensed or even recorded a handful of songs for the soundtrack, but Crime Life is rather devoid of any notable music tracks. In fact, most of the game’s music is bizarre European rap. The soundtrack doesn’t trigger automatically either – you have to jump into the pause menu and turn it on manually. The voice acting in Crime Life is amateurish at best, and is dragged down further by terrible, clichéd dialogue.
Crime Life: Gang Wars is one of those classic “me-too” games that tries to copy everything a successful game has done, and yet completely botches it. There’s just nothing even slightly likeable in the game – players are more likely to have fun banging their heads against a wall or cleaning rubbish on a highway than they’ll have with Crime Life.
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