Review (PC)

The kernel of this game's design is rife with potential fun. You get to be a vice cop, patrolling a functioning city, inflicting justice on crooks, gang members, and punks, discovering the details of a more nefarious plot behind the city's crime wave. You can beat up the bad guys using the rudimentary martial arts you learned at the academy, and arrest them, or you can just shoot them, assuming you've enough ammo to go around. You can hop in a police cruiser or SUV, and make your way around town on the streets. You can get onto the rooftops and cavort about the city's canopy. All this you can do and more. The city is your stage, so to speak.

Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Free-form gameplay. That's a pitch that usually lands right in my gaming wheel house, if you'll excuse a baseball metaphor. So what keeps Urban Chaos from being a home run? Simple:

NO MID-MISSION SAVE!

And it doesn't help that the interface is rather ungainly. But mostly, Urban Chaos is scuttled by this one major (and fatal) design flaw. And, quite frankly, I'm at a loss to explain it. Here's a game that encourages you, actually cajoles you, to have your way with its missions, to explore and loiter and wander and roam and investigate its nooks and crannies. The developers have gone to great lengths to create an environment, this crime-ridden city, that is dynamic and large and intriguing and totally open to you. Heck, they even let you jump into a car and drive around town. And then they give you absolutely no way to protect your time investment. You end up wanting to get through the missions as quickly as possible and with a very high aversion to risk because you can't save your game. When I invest, say, 45 minutes in a mission (and make no mistake, the game basically begs you to do just that) only to then get hit by a car crossing the street, or attempt a rooftop leap that looks feasible and instead plummet a few floors to the pavement, I lose all interest in the free-form gameplay. When I give a game 45 minutes and it flushes it down the toilet in the blink of an eye, I don't want to give it another 45 minutes. And this is such a tragedy, because it's not that I don't want to spend the time in the game. I do. I like the gameplay. But just because a game is free-form doesn't mean that it doesn't have progress, nor does it mean that players aren't vested in their progress. In fact, quite the opposite, I think. 45 minutes where you've done exactly what you wanted to do, played at your own pace, etc.. is much more valuable than 45 minutes in a game that's strictly linear.

And this whole issue is exacerbated by the interface, which as I mentioned is rather unaccommodating. The character and camera control schemes are unrefined, sluggish, and poorly implemented. And I say this knowing that a 3rd person action game can have good controls. Max Payne did a fine job, as did Rune (whose flaws were all combat related, rather than movement/camera), though both fall behind the current standard bearer: Heretic 2. So, it can be done and done well, and Urban Chaos just doesn't do it well. In and of itself, a clumsy control scheme won't cripple an action game (exception: Die By The Sword). If play remains fun, you adjust. In fact, adjust is exactly what I did. To play Urban Chaos with any sense of grace, I had to exploit the advanced properties of my gamepad driver. As witnessed in this screenshot, I was forced to map significant dead zones to the X/Y axes, and apply a nonlinear curve to the remaining range. God help you if you don't have a gamepad that lets you do this sort of hardcore configuring, or even worse, if you don't have a gamepad at all. For a game that debuted on the Playstation and Dreamcast in addition to the PC, it seemed to map very poorly to a default gamepad.

But the point I'm getting at isn't that the interface is rough, but rather that the interface itself won't necessarily kill the fun for you. Rather, in the case of Urban Chaos, the rough interface significantly increases the odds that you would die due to some accidental action, or some action inconsistent with what you really meant to do. So you die, and that would be tolerable, too, IF YOU COULD SAVE YOUR GAME!!! Instead, unexpected and frustrating death due to the interface brings with it the complete forfeiture of a potentially large sum of time. And THAT is what took the wind out of my gaming sails.

Urban Chaos is a lot like Redguard, in that it's a game whose huge deposit of fun just couldn't be mined because of a crippling combo of issues wholly independent of the game's core design. In Redguard, it was stupid jumping puzzles combined with a clumsy interface. In Urban Chaos, it's the lack of a mid-mission save combined with a clumsy interface. I quit both games, without having finished them, feeling more disappointed than frustrated. These games could have been so much fun!