Urban Chaos

What always stuck with me was the dark and gritty the streets of Union City in the setting of a female officer tasked with fighting a widespread crimewave. After the tutorials in learning basic movement through obstacles, driving, and handling yourself in a fight with some decent moves, you are sent out alone onto the streets to carry out your duties. There are the early elements of RPG that you build through normal gameplay and areas of the map to watch criminal activity viewed by percentage indicator. Big kicker for anyone is the lack of either save point, checkpoints, custom saves during gameplay - only saves after completed missions. Being a decent sized sandbox with missions that can take around an hour, why Mucky Foot decided not to have more saves points in place was bizarre. This is made even worse with bugs or crashes, one happened right at the end of the very short first mission and I recalled I played it 15 times until it didn't crash. Bought this again having played this constantly for months at release. Thinking back I don't know how I managed to play this without a mouse (there is zero mouse support). Thankfully keybinds are changeable though without a mouse I'm forced to play in a way that I don't normally. Pressing Forwards + Sprint + Kick to slide in on suspects for an easy takedown is far harder than what we are used to now. The mouse and all those mouse buttons makes it far easier to execute. How it will play on modern systems; you'll either strike lucky and love this game as much as I did in 1999, or encounter the same infuriating CTD (crash to desktop) problem as me every 5 or 10 minutes. Note it affects other gamers whether they bought it from GOG or not. There isn't a solution to this but plenty of people suggesting possible remedies that really only worked for them, that's if you take their word for it. I tried all these tweaks over a 4 hour period and not once did the CTD lessen leaving me no option other than to abandon Urban Chaos.

Predating Bungie's cult-classic third person action game by about two years, Urban Chaos also promised - and largely delivered - an action experience that combined third person melee combat with third person gunplay, all delivered in a GTA-style sandbox-like open world which even allowed you to drive vehicles in-game. The result was an experience that may have lacked the intricacies of Oni's level design, or Oni's distinctive anime style, but nevertheless still delivered a lot of fun. The only real problem with this game are the clunky controls, which feel awkward and slow even with a gamepad. Still, despite that, it's quite an enjoyable game, and if you're looking for something a different on GOG, you could do a lot worse than this title.

I used to play this on my old PC. It used to crash if you looked at certain explosions (it was an OLD pc). But I still played it and had to look away every time such an explosion was about to happen. Still I kept playing it because it was such a great game. Bought it here and plan to play it when I have the time. In any case, you should definitely play it. Great game.

Back in 1999 when I was so young that I could not afford to buy actual games, I got the demo for this on a magazine CD. I played the demo hundrets of times (180s free roaming in a certain area) and I loved it to bits. The game, sorta Tomb Raider meets GTA3 with lots of brawling - is generally good but doesn't hold out for it's entire length. It gets a bit old towards the end. If you ever held the peculiar and rather detailed fanatsy of being a sassy and extremely violent black female cop in a dystopian city... this delivers.

It's one of my favorites games of PS1. It's still fun!