Crime Cities - Review (part 1 of 2)


3.5/5 stars - Good, but play on very easy difficulty setting


Reading the description of the game on GOG, I have to laugh: not only does it vastly exaggerate when it says that this is a "revolutionary mix of shooter and future vehicle simulator" but it also wrongly states that there are 4 distinct cities (there are in fact only 3, something that can already be guessed from the game's intro - and no the tutorial level does not count being just a short virtual simulator). Crime Cities was initially released in 2000, long after G-Police (1997) and even after the latter's sequel G-Police: Weapons of Justice (1999); BHunter, which was released in 1999, is even more similar as it brought to life almost exactly the same concept as Crime Cities (the differences are in the story motivations and the order of missions - which is entirely linear in the case of BHunter).

With all that said, the good news is Crime Cities is a good game.

Like the other aforementioned games, it uses the cyberpunk aesthetic to build a dystopian future heavily inspired by Blade Runner (and the thrill of the film's flight sequences through near-future Los Angeles). At the time it came out, Crime Cities might very well have had the most simultaneously moving 3D objects ever crammed into a game, with at times up to roughly 100 flying cars, buses, limos, and cops rendered in real-time, all weaving through - or above - the canyonlike avenues of each city at various altitudes... This significant amount of traffic helps bring to life the futuristic setting, along with the flying billboards, including that famous Japanese girl advertisement lifted straight from the aforementioned movie, and a myriad of other details ranging from big screens on skyscrapers with animated adverts for music to LED sign boards for strip clubs... Another impressive feature is the amount of verticality in the game, with huge skyscrapers hundreds of meters high (and quite possibly more in the final city) piercing the lower cloud layer. Unfortunately, the game's draw distance is fairly limited - not as bad as in G-Police, but while it seems generally acceptable as the fog effect contributes to the overall dark atmosphere (and on the first two planets it also rains a lot), this technical limitation is more bothersome when you reach the final city, because while the Brutalist architecture seems to be done on purpose (mirroring the "brutal" nature of the place in contrast with the more refined cities previously encountered), the sheer scale of the place is somewhat wasted when one cannot behold the entirety of a scene (and per unit volume, there is generally less detail here then in the previous cities, which translates into more visual boredom). However, overall the game does have a good amount of appeal visually (provided you are not allergic to the genre), nailing its aesthetic and having some decent lighting effects (in particular when firing weapons or during explosions), such that the graphics could be said to be somewhere between good and very good (and closer to very good, on the level of the original Unreal basically - just short of Unreal Tournament or Deus Ex). And the game's CGI cinematics look very good. The biggest problem is one of repetition: you'd think visiting 3 planets would provide a decent amount of variety, but the overall feel is similar - despite an evolution from the more complete vision of a city that is the first location to a more "post-apocalyptic" environment by the time you reach the final location.

Although the game completely skips the concept of Vertical Take-Off and Landing aircraft (except in its cinematics funnily enough), which means this is not a true 6 degrees of freedom title (you can only thrust along the X and Y axes), I found the controls to be fairly easy to get used to - as long as you play with mouse and keyboard. Yes, initially the controls seem too sensitive, but having tried to play this with a Thrustmaster T.Flight Hotas X it quickly became clear that the precision attained with mouse+keyboard cannot be beaten in this game.

The game casts you in the role of an undercover agent who must infiltrate the ecosystem of Pandemia, a planetary system of 6 planets "on the outer rim of Federation space" which has been turned into a penal colony. Specifically, three planets hold your interest: Tavaroon, used for people with "low aggression coefficient" such as financial criminals and smugglers - this is where you find the first city of the game; Quarzon, almost entirely covered by water, holds a bigger spectrum of the criminal world, from hackers to political criminals; and finally Blackloud, designated for terrorists and war criminals - a place without Federation authorities. To be honest, the game's intro cinematic does a very good job at setting up the story and it's just a shame that the storytelling in-game never quite manages to be as compelling. Part of the problem lies in the repetitive nature of the gameplay, and especially how the mechanics limit your approach to any given problem. You'll spend the entire game inside the cockpit of a flyer, taking on jobs you pick up from the ICNB - a "virtual job center" that can be accessed by cops, smugglers, anarchists, terrorists and the occasional nutcase who might be looking for someone to escort him on his doomed attempt at finding a hidden alien city. When you complete an assignment, you'll earn a specified number of credits which you will then use to improve your craft with new weapons and shields and a new look in case you've mistakenly broken the law by firing on civilians or cops. While it's nice that you can usually choose which mission to do next, the problem is that in spite of the occasional outlier (generally connected to the main story), most missions are simple variations on the following: seek and destroy, defend position, escort, collect and drop - and in the vast majority of cases, you have to deal with the same types of enemy vehicles, with only HP variations, and with the same AI that leads to the same difficult brand of guerrilla dogfighting over and over again. Balance is an issue here: it is not uncommon to have earned only just enough credits to recover from the last mission even on the easiest difficulty setting! And I completed Deus Ex on the realistic difficulty setting. In Crime Cities, I experienced having to start again from an earlier save to avoid a tough side mission that I had previously completed in order to have enough funds to make it through the city's last battles. There is certainly an element of strategy to the choice of missions and upgrades for your flyer, which is a positive thing, but the constant slamming into buildings and slow-moving vehicles stemming from the heavy traffic previously mentioned means the experience does become at times an exercise in frustration... tactical manoeuvres are possible, but limited despite the initial impression of freedom and more often then not will boil down to retreat and "pick'em off from a distance". As a result, this is the first game I completed on a difficulty setting lower than medium.

Crime Cities - Review (part 2 of 2)


A gripping narrative can make up for this, but the game is content to only give just enough material to motivate the player to continue, with characters that are usually just archetypes for flavour and at best only briefly developed. Actually, for the most part the in-game narrative really is just for adding flavour to the environments and missions the player traverses... Voice acting, which was pretty common in games of this genre by the year 2000, could have gone some ways to enhancing the personalities encountered, but unfortunately - outside of the intro and outro - there is none of it, no audio logs, only e-mails, mission descriptions, a couple of short written lines transmitted at times during missions and the occasional line of news appearing at the top of the screen... All these revelatory tidbits slowly reveal the background of the universe and the actual plot, but the game really does the minimum to build a credible universe - until the actual ending, which, just like the intro, actually does quite a bit more than the minimum, and in my view provides not just a satisfying ending, it also makes the game's story good overall! But much more could have been done with this setting, which would have helped alleviate the repetitive nature of the game.

And repetition truly is Crime Cities' biggest problem: this can again be felt with the soundtrack, which is good - at its best it's very good - but it is the same throughout the whole game, never changing depending on location, never adapting to the action on screen. It's half an hour long, so fortunately not very short, but it would have been much better to have a system of dynamic music à la Deus Ex, or at least a different soundtrack for each city. The sounds heard throughout the game are mostly limited to the firing of weapons and the ensuing explosions, the sound of your vehicle bumping into things (kind of grating), as well as the little beeps when pressing buttons in the menu of your flyer's control system. There are some ambient sounds but they are increasingly limited - in the first city you will occasionally (when the soundtrack doesn't cover everything except weapon fire and explosions) hear some short music loop or announcement coming from a nearby bar or some LED advertising board, but there is no sound of wind or machinery from industrial plants and later cities are increasingly devoid of such sophistications...

And there are cases where the lack of polish hurts immersion: for example, at one point you are supposed to be fighting unmanned vehicles, with most of them looking exactly the same as manned flyers but I can accept that, however when they drop out of the sky after sustaining too much damage, the player hears the same screaming over the radio as with manned flyers! Another thing is the weather info that pops up at times: on the first planet you visit, which is closest to Pandemia's star, the temperatures fluctuate around 100°C which appears to make sense, but you will see the same weather parameters on every planet you visit, without any variation (except for the lack of rain on Blackloud), which is of course a developer oversight...

Overall, then, the game is actually good, but I would only recommend it to those who enjoy both sci-fi (and cyberpunk in particular) and action games... and even then, I would only recommend playing Crime Cities on the very easy difficulty setting: trust me, you will still get a challenge, and at the same time you will not spend too much time on this, giving you more time for all the other interesting titles out there...