It was on sale when I bought it, people had called it Diablo with guns. I thought, why not check it out? I figured I'd play a few hours and be done. 40+ hours later I still fire this game up from time to time to unwind. The story is stupid and the voice acting hilariously bad. But the engine is pretty dang good and there are lots of weapons to try. In a world of serious and gritty games this throwback is a nice breath of air. It was definitely a surprise hit for me, good times.
This game could have been so much more than it is. It has great visuals, animation, atmosphere, interesting story, etc. But the thing that bugs me most about it is that despite the huge open cities, your tasks are extremely linear. Go here, listen to some guys, rough this guy up for info, track this other guy, race some dude, help your friends for a favor, and so on. The assassinations themselves are no different. You are not given options on how you might tackle the task. It usually boils down to bum rush them and stab them in broad daylight. I guess I was expecting some Hitman style planning and execution, but it's just not there. I feel like if they had taken a few nods from Hitman such as the planning, memorizing guard patterns, disguises, and multiple options of how to kill your target this game would have been epic. I felt more like a psychotic madman who just enjoyed stabbing people in public rather than an assassin. "Stealth" is just about non existent in this game. It's fun enough to play through once but I'll never bother with it again.
This is no Diablo, and that 's fine. Understand this game is not about murdering thousands of foes, but rather only a few hundred. There are some cool effects and ideas here, but to be honest it got boring for me about 5 hours in. It starts repeating the monster attacks constantly and never evolves beyond being a point an spam attack game. Not bad but certainly not something I'd play again.
Nothing like peeling out before the light and crushing your enemies. I don't think I ever won a "race" by doing the laps, I always opted for the more amusing options of killing all the pedestrians (harder than it sounds) or crushing all the other cars. This game is full of style and fun, great after a long day in traffic. Being a young lad when I first played it, I had never seen Deathrace 2000. Watching the movie many years later I laughed as I saw the clear influence of the movie on the game, totally awesome. If you ever wanted to live out the movie Deathrace, the original of course not that remake garbage, here's your chance. Gentlemen, start your engines!
