This review was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Its format does not match our own but we support its content. It was written by Chuck Landry.

Let’s just get right to the point. Whoever was the first person out there to decide that gamers are suckers for rap music and the “thugz life” urban culture needs to be identified, located, and shot in the knees. I don’t know how much longer I can take it, but with games like Def Jam Fight for New York, 25 to Life, 50 Cent Bulletproof, and now Crime Life: Gang Wars all either recently released or on their way, it would seem that the idiots who run their little board meetings aren’t finished shoving it down our throats. Now hear this, all you bigwigs at EA, Konami, Ubisoft, and Eidos: Rap stars and rap music do not make games good - or exciting, for that matter. And it does not make us gamers feel “cool” to live our supposed dreams of gangsta’ life out in a videogame. It makes us hate videogames like yours.

I guess I have to review Crime Life: Gang Wars, anyway.

As you can probably tell, I’m not actually a gangster (although I play one on my Xbox). I don’t watch MTV and I don’t wear my pants around my knees yet my boxers to my bellybutton. However, I will admit that the music in Crime Life is actually pretty good. The story itself features several members of the group D12, and although they don’t actually have many songs on the game’s soundtrack, the European hip-hop featured isn’t bad at all. I’ve actually never heard of the artists, which include DOOM MAN, and Jason Flemyng, but the tracks are good when you actually hear them… which isn’t often by default.

The story in Crime Life is about a young thug named Tre (that would be you) who rises through the ranks of the Outlawz gang while fighting against rival gangs the Headhunterz and the KYC. Missions involve beating gang members up, robbing stores, destroying property, fighting the cops, and spray painting walls. The gameplay, while it sounds varied, is like a 3D version of the 16-bit classic Final Fight. The core of the game is a simple fighting system, which consists of two kinds of attacks, throws, blocking, and some special moves and finishing attacks. On the bright side, Crime Life is a game anyone can pick up and master in about 20 minutes. On the negative side, that’s about when they’ll realize they no longer have any desire to play.

The combat system mentioned above is really pretty bad. It’s not effective because you’re often fighting swarms of enemies at once, and you can’t switch targets very accurately without getting pummeled from three different thugs. The clunky maneuvers will remind you of the fighting system in Rockstar’s Manhunt, which speaks volumes for how unsatisfying it is. You may have different objectives throughout the game, but they are each accomplished the same way, without any variation: simply head towards the marker on your map, and beat up wave after wave of rival gang members along the way. They swarm and swarm often, so you just have to block, wait for them to finish out their combo, press the attack with a combo of your own, block, and repeat until they’re all dead. After a few good combos on your part, the Y button appears above the enemies’ heads, meaning you can tap it and execute a finishing move. These change depending on what weapon you are holding and which way the enemy is facing when you press the Y button. You also have an adrenaline bar that fills up easily, allowing you to do some “brutal” and “special” moves, but those aren’t terribly exciting, either. That, in a nutshell, is the combat system. And that, in a simpler nutshell, is Crime Life. There is very little else to do in the game other than brawl.

Throughout this nauseating repetitiveness, you’ll notice some pretty uninspired sound effects. You’ll notice shortly after that for a game so proud to proclaim its cameos by D12… there really isn’t any music playing 90% of the time. You can solve this by pausing the game and selecting a track, but… what were they thinking on that one? It seems like a slight oversight to me.

Graphically, the game is pretty hit or miss. Nothing about it is astounding, but some parts look decidedly better than others. The leaves on the trees are individually visible rather than one giant clump of green, and the textures on the cars are sharp if a little under-detailed. It’s the character models that confuse me, though. For a game that is so heavy on the combat, I expected the characters to be the graphical pinnacle. Not so. In fact, whenever you actually get a good look at somebody’s face, it looks no better than the face textures from Rare’s N64 title, Goldeneye. Can you say “blurry,” class?

The game is filled with other problems, like a bad camera and the worst script I’ve ever heard in a videogame. The “elder” who runs the barbershop is the main culprit, but the two fools who hang out there are even worse. “Your mama bought me this outfit last week!” “Ohhh, damn, dawg! That’s cold!’ And even though it probably wouldn’t have helped, a multiplayer mode (even offline) would have at least put forth the impression that they were trying to make a decent game.

I have no idea how Konami expects to sell more than six copies of this game. The members of D12 might buy it to put it in some self-idolizing shrine, but nobody else should go anywhere near it. It’s the kind of bad game where you wonder if the developer didn’t even come up with the idea, but it was pushed upon them by D12, who likely paid them to make a game about the band. Who knows, but it’s crap, and I ask all of our readers to stay away from it (even at its $20 price) to send a message to game studios that we don’t want any more of this crap arriving on shelves.

The gameplay consists of nothing but running the streets, fighting gang members when you cross

A mix of some okay modeling and some horrendous textures.

The soundtrack actually isn’t bad, but you don’t even hear it much.

No, no, no, no, no.

And… no.