State of Emergency

"Living in Grand Theft Auto III's shadow."

Grand Theft Auto III the best game of all time (so far). The company Rockstar had the success of their character Donald Love, so they decide to make a smaller version of Grand Theft Auto III and come up with the idea of a corrupt corporation, such as the 1940's when Adolf Hitler was in rule of Nazi Germany where people are beaten on a regular basis. ''The whole thing stank'' in my opinion. Everyone had their expectations on a gangster type genre that Grand Theft Auto III had, but this game is living in it's shadow. This is my review for one of the biggest disappointments in gaming history.

Gameplay: 6/10, Fair:
It's a nice shoot 'em up, I'll give it that. Unlike it's Rockstar counterpart, it failed to do may, many things. When I sat down to play Grand Theft Auto III it was sometimes to relieve stress from school, when I saw this hyped up game at my local Blockbuster sometime back I thought it would've been a great stress reliever, but, it gave me more stress actually. The difficulty is hard to very hard because of some of the missions when twenty or so guards are chasing you and you have to let a hacker into a bookstore. Grand Theft Auto III had some of the same aspects of police chasing you and your partners in crime telling you to get rid of them, but on this game they are like homing missiles, they will hut you down and will not stop until you are dead and beaten to a bloody pulp. When you take a look of how many levels there are you may say to yourself ''this is way to easy''. I did the first time I rented this game and I even regret renting it up to this point. Well I guess this happens when you are in someone's shadow.

Graphics: 7/10, Good:
This graphics compared to Grand Theft Auto III are actually done better in my opinion. If you remember, when you meet with Donald Love especially, the character's bodies looked contorted disformed because of is blocky shape, this game seems to have an edge to that, but not by much. The characters do look better than the Grand Theft Auto III models including the civilians but some look a bit cartoonish in a way. The skins for the more heavy civilians look like the Ricardo Diaz skins, more cartoonish than any other civilians. Some of the objects looked this way too, but the main one was the guns. The Uzi was the size of the characters arm which, I have to say, is not acceptable. I believe Rockstar was in a hurry because the due of demand.

Sound: 4/10, Poor:
This game's audio is almost bad but it's hanging on by a thread with poor. The voice actors seemed a bit boring, such as the narrator during your Chaos missions, he sounds a bit shaky or more so nervous. The female news reporter at the character selection screen was okay but sounded a bit unrealistic, acting calm during a situation such as this game has. The characters such as McNeil did not sound good either, like Rockstar just pick anyone to do a goofy, hard guy, voice. When you would use a weapon to fire or hit with the civilians would all scream like women. The only time I heard a manly type scream would be from the guards. The sound really was not good.

Control: 5/10, Mediocre:
The control was a bit hard to figure out with a clumsy type base on it. When you are in a tough spot with the guards you may find yourself pressing the button to pick something up instead of hitting them. Using a gun or melee weapons was a bit odd as well, pressing the X button felt weird after not playing video games for about a month or so now. Something that confused me was the strafing type button, it felt horrid to switch the camera angles to shoot and move to one side. Besides this, and those darn running buttons, I thought it was okay.

Story:
Somewhat Grand Theft Autoish feel to it. As I had said in my introduction it is like Nazi Germany in the 1940's, happiness is something rare in this corrupt world, because of one corporation. A bit odd, the army, navy, and any other help group would have already put a stop to this terrorism but no, as most of Rockstar's games you have to fight terrorism with terrorism. Anyway you play as any character as you please and go on a ''kill the corporation''. A bit sad really, I was expecting more.

Replayability: 2/10, Terrible:
I would believe after play excruciatingly hard levels of difficulty, repetitiveness are sometimes bore you will not want to play this game and go through all of that once again. Unless you play Chaos mode where that's makes it a delight to play this game one last time. So it's chances of replayability... slim to none.

Buy or Rent:
After reading my review it's quite obvious. If you want to get a game the fails in comparison to Grand Theft Auto III then rent it. I suggest under no circumstances you should buy this monstrosity.

Overall: 5/10, Mediocre:
This game overall is very ''iffy''. I only had an enjoyable playing time on the Chaos mode which I strongly recommend if you do not want to face the pain of restarting a mission over and over again. I hope this review has given you enough information to decide on your quest and questions of this game, let's just hope that Grand Theft Auto: Vice City can top over a failing year in the media.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 09/15/02, Updated 09/15/02