Game Over Online ~ Urban Chaos

GameOver Game Reviews - Urban Chaos (c) Eidos Interactive, Reviewed by - Wolf

Game & Publisher Urban Chaos (c) Eidos Interactive
System Requirements Pentium II-350, 32MB Ram, 3D Accelerator
Overall Rating 78%
Date Published Friday, December 24th, 1999 at 08:57 PM


Divider Left By: Wolf Divider Right

You’re a cop in a big city with lots of bad guys. As your average "rookie" you are responsible for single handidly taking out every single bad guy in Union City. You want a storyline, you can go play Final Fantasy. This isn’t one of those "intelligent" type of games where actual coherent thoughts are required to complete certain tasks. Your sole requirements are faint hints of intelligent life, the ability to bash certain keys very quickly and at consistent rates, and the ability to stop doing so when not required.

To begin, there are several training courses for general clambering, combat, and driving cars. All this is presented in a graphics engine using an odd "eliptoid" method of presenting characters and all character models are constructed of circles, although you will be hard pressed to notice this easily while playing the game. The engine also hosts a cunning method of fogging known as "Chunks Up Your Computer Really Really Badly". As soon as this lovely mist starts coming onto the screen, you will be host to your spectacular computer running at some pathetically crappy frame rates. That feature aside, the engine is adequate to display the cities and alleyways.

The combat is much like your average fighting game, except that you usually engage multiple enemies at once. For anybody who wants a better representation of combat, take your nearest keyboard you don’t particularly like, and then bang the arrow keys and the "z" and "x" button repeatedly. The one irritating thing here with the cop is that the simplest way to take out dozens of bad guys is to simply hit the "forward" and "punch" buttons madly to flip your enemy, and then handcuff them. No baddies ever seem to interfere while you do this on them one at a time. This really starts to detract from the gameplay, but admittedly the introduction of some big guns start to lessen the effectiveness of this dull but highly effective tactic. The other half of the game involves clambering, and lots of it. Your objectives are stated at the start in a short and snappy briefing, and then coloured dots are shown on your personal little rookie radar. It is sometimes harder than you would think to reach a certain place, having to search for some darn, obscured ladder which could be anywhere in a 50 meter radius about your appointed dot. Clambering about though is the main tool to be used when trying to find bonuses hidden within a level. Every level has a certain number of bonuses scattered about seemingly randomly and requires quite a bit of clambering to find. These bonuses will increase the statistics of your character.

Then there is the third aspect of the game: driving. Utilizing a complete and utter lack of physics, your car controls more like a train on tracks going round the corners as it somehow manages to go through a tight u-bend at full speed perfectly. No sliding of the wheels, just zip, and you’ve taken the turn. Your car also seems to have slightly screwed up braking as tapping the "brake" key, when going over a certain speed, means your driver goes against all your guiding of lightly tapping the break and plants her foot on the brake like there’s no tomorrow, taking your car into a elaborate hand brake sliding stop. Driving is not really a big feature in the game though, it does happen at a few key points with a small variety of vehicles, but its not really one of the game basics.

Well that’s basically all there is to it. It might sound like it would get a bit repetitive but that’s because it does. Though they have tried to add some twists to it like being able to control a gangster and some other mystery man who fits into the…erm…"plot". I loathe calling it a plot, basically it’s just some silly excuse to beat lots of people up and lousily carried out through some really horribly done conversations. But all that is not at stake here, this game is here so you can run around and beat people up. After all, it is just *fun*. There’s nothing really special about the title, but if your looking to spend a while on a nice fun action game that will keep you busy for a bit, then this is for you.

 

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Rating
78%
 

 

 
 

 

 

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