25 to Life Hands-On

When you think about it, online shooter fans don't really have a lot of variety to choose from in terms of setting. You've got your real-world military stuff, such as SOCOM and Ghost Recon, and you've got your sci-fi shooters, from Halo to Unreal Tournament. Eidos, developer Avalanche, and Highway 1 Productions are aiming to bring a little more diversity--and a lot more grit--to the popular genre with 25 to Life, an upcoming shooter set in the mean streets that will let you play as the good guys with the badges or the gangs that make their lives difficult. We got a look at a new build of the game recently, and it looks like it should offer plenty of solid action for fans of SOCOM and other similar games.

Naturally, the most important part of any shooter is the shooting action itself, and thankfully it looks like 25 to Life has got it in that department. The game is played by default from a standard third-person perspective, and you can click the right thumbstick to zoom in a little bit, in the style of many similar shooters. Interestingly, you can also hit up on the D pad to bring the camera down into a first-person view, so you can essentially play the game as a first-person shooter if that's your style--though the third-person perspective will obviously give you a greater field of view.

The differences between the cops and the gang members will be more than cosmetic. For instance, the cops may have lesser weapons to work with, such as simple sidearms and Tasers, but their training will mean they have greater accuracy. The thugs, meanwhile, will have no reservations about using heavy weapons like AK-47s, but they won't necessarily be as accurate with them, and they'll go down faster than the police officers who may be equipped with body armor. But as criminals with presumably no morals, you'll be able to grab innocent bystanders and use them as human shields, which will make the good guys hesitate before firing at you (giving you an obvious upper hand). The cops won't necessarily have to slaughter every punk that gets in their way, either. If you're feeling like a boy scout, you'll have nonlethal-takedown options available, such as the aforementioned Taser. Then again, when you've got magnums, MP5s, and grenades at your disposal, who wants to be kind?

Any good shooter needs a wealth of different gameplay modes to stay fresh, and 25 to Life will ship with four different ones. War is the standard deathmatch that pits good guy against bad; raid will put the cops on the offensive, tasking them with infiltrating a fortified position, such as a drug house, and cleaning it out; robbery will have you playing the crooks, who are trying to get inside, steal the loot, and blast their way back out; and finally the tag mode will have you roaming the environment, attempting to plant your graffiti in the most places in order to win. Of course, you'll be able to set up weapon presets before you go into a match, so you can radically change the gameplay by limiting which weapons people will have access to (as in any good online shooter).

The game will emphasize customized characters online. You'll be able to create your own officers and gangbangers, and then when you jump into a multiplayer game, your custom model will be used automatically. We played around with the character-customization setup and saw a ton of options for making your character look unique. You'll select different regions of the body--head, torso, arms, legs, and feet--and then change a large number of options for each section. Just about everything can be changed, from hairstyles, facial features, and skin tones, to tattoos, types of clothing, jewelry, and even your kicks. The game will feature clothing from established, well-known brands, though Highway 1 says those partnerships won't be announced until the game is closer to shipping.

Online play will give 25 to Life the bulk of its replayability, but the game will also have a substantial single-player story mode for you to blast your way through. It appears you'll be playing as a character named Freeze, an up-and-coming thug who will have to deal with plenty of people gunning for his life--on both sides of the law. The game's story was penned by former executive editor of The Source and general hip-hop luminary P. Frank Williams, who told us he's strived to make sure 25 to Life's plot isn't as clichéd and predictable as some other seemingly "real" urban dramas. To that end, the game will feature a diverse cast of ethnic personalities. We were told to expect to encounter a contingent of Spanish-speaking characters at one point, for instance.

We hadn't gotten a look at 25 to Life since E3, and it's clear that Avalanche and Highway 1 have put considerable time into polishing the graphics and the environments since we last saw the game. The maps are set in a large number of diverse environments, from upscale places like a bank, a shopping mall, and a penthouse, to less glamorous places like the subway, the slums, and a prison. These maps seem to have a good deal of activity going on in them. One map features an elevated train rushing by, for instance, and there will be plenty of stuff to break into in the maps, like the mall. The visuals in the Xbox version of the game will be further improved by its widescreen, 720p high-definition support (which looks pretty darn nice, we must say).

You'd expect a game of this sort to have a soundtrack full of big-name, licensed hip-hop tracks, and you'd be right. But Eidos isn't ready to announce the full lineup on 25 to Life's soundtrack just yet. So far, Tupac, Mos Def, DMX, and Ghostface Killah have all been confirmed to be on the soundtrack, and apparently more songs will be revealed in the coming months. One nifty feature is that there will be radios scattered throughout each multiplayer map, and you can run up to a radio at any time to change to a different song. Outside the soundtrack, the game's sound design seems solid, with plenty of gunfire and explosions that pack a decent punch.

If you're into games in the vein of SOCOM but you've gotten tired of all the realistic warfare or marauding aliens, 25 to Life may be just what you've been waiting for. The game seems to be on track to present a good alternative to the many traditional shooters on the market, and with several months to go--the game is scheduled for release in the spring--Avalanche and Highway 1 should be able to continue polishing it into its solid, final form. Look for more on 25 to Life in the coming months.