Take the sci-fi movies Blade Runner and Escape from New York and combine them in a game that borrows a lot from the classic 3D shooter Descent, and you've got a good idea of what Crime Cities is all about. It might sound enticing--but this is one case where the whole is definitely less than the sum of the parts. Crime Cities is initially impressive, but its frustrating controls and simple mission design make it quickly lose appeal.
Crime Cities casts you as Garm Tiger, a cop who's been sent to a planetary system called Pandemia. It is 16 light years from Earth, and it's been partly converted into a penal colony by "The Federation." Tiger's primary objective is to locate a missing undercover agent, but he's also been given the task of learning all he can about the recent increase in organized crime activities and the potential for terrorism that might result.
When you begin the game, all you've got to work with is an aircraft, a few thousand credits, and a couple of other undercover agents to feed you information and help you blend into the wild world of futuristic prison life. And just how do you do that? Certainly not by hitting the streets and talking to everyone you meet. Instead, you'll spend the entire game inside the cockpit of a flyer, taking on jobs you pick up from the ICNB. The ICNB is a "virtual job center" that can be accessed by cops, robbers, anarchists, terrorists, and even by men looking for a "date," presumably to break the monotony of prison life. When you complete an assignment, you'll earn a specified number of credits used to--you guessed it--improve your craft with new weapons and shields and a new look in case you've mistakenly broken the law by firing on civilians or cops.
With each passing mission, you learn more about the inner workings of the criminal, religious, or terrorist organizations of Pandemia--the plot is slowly revealed as you play the game. These revelatory tidbits appear in the form of e-mails, and it seems these outlaws have gotten as hooked on the medium as folks are nowadays: You'll get dozens of them during your stay on each of the three planets. The e-mails run the gamut from insider info from your informants to ads for 900 numbers and requests for a night on the town from mysterious admirers. But in the end, the gameplay boils down to a steady stream of assignments that result in weapons and systems upgrades, culminating in a showdown with an enemy who's managed to build himself quite a wicked flying machine. You can expect to encounter a multitude of enemies on even the most routine assignment, and while you can achieve mission goals without killing them all, it simply means they'll be lying in wait when you head out on the next job.
That's not all you have to deal with: Crime Cities might very well have the most simultaneously moving 3D objects ever crammed into a game. Literally hundreds of flying cars, buses, limos, and cops weave through the canyonlike avenues of each city at various altitudes, posing a constant hazard for anyone who's busy dealing with a dozen gang members. While the cars and buildings aren't highly detailed, the frame rate is excellent even on a midrange system with a decent video card such as the TNT2--we got great performance at resolutions up to 1280x1024.
The story might get a little confusing, and the routine doesn't change enough to shake you out of your fly-shoot-buy mindset, but that's certainly not enough to keep Crime Cities from being fun to play. After all, there have been numerous games built on essentially the same premise that were a real blast. The problem lies at the very heart of the game's design. Unfortunately, dogfighting in a bustling metropolis just isn't much fun. After constantly slamming into buildings and slow-moving vehicles, the awe you'll experience when you first see the city will slowly simmer into frustration because you simply don't have enough room for tactical maneuvers. What should be an intense, action-packed dogfight--as in Microsoft's recent Crimson Skies, for example--turns into an agonizing, exceedingly difficult brand of guerilla dogfighting. Faced with 10 or more opponents firing from all sides, your best bet is to run away, back up against a building so you can't be tagged from behind, and simply duke it out against smaller numbers until you're forced to retreat again.
The controls in Crime Cities are a major problem as well. It's bad enough that there's no support for the "twist" function on the MS SideWinder 3D Pro or Force Feedback Pro (the game instead recognizes the throttle as the Z axis), but the aircraft can't move directly along the vertical plane as in Descent. If you want to sneak up on an antiaircraft battery above you, you've got to approach it just as you would in a plane, and the results aren't pretty. Setting acceleration, both forward and backward, is a frustrating affair with either of the aforementioned sticks, and invariably you'll wind up ramming buildings and vehicles you should be able to easily avoid. And the sound that accompanies these collisions is not only confusing (it sounds more like you're being shot) but also very grating.
The computer-controlled enemy pilots in the game aren't very commendable, either. You'll see enemies perform endless passes in front of your field of fire as you hide in the area where you can refit your ship without threat of damage. The cities are very monotonous, too. There are only three in all, and after a few assignments in which the biggest challenges are dodging skyscrapers and fleeing in order to achieve winnable odds, you probably won't be too impressed with the Blade Runner-inspired scenery.
One aspect of Crime Cities in which developer Techland apparently invested considerable effort was in the game's multiplayer mode. In it, you can fly any of the vehicles you see in the game--you can even play as an electronic billboard!--in each of the three cities found in the single-player game. Standard deathmatch and team deathmatch options are available for up to 16 players, and options to eliminate damage from hitting traffic and buildings means your shields should hold up better than in the single-player game. However, you may have problems finding someone to play against. We never managed to find an active server, nor could we find any place online that contained server lists so we could manually enter an IP address or domain address.
At a glance, Crime Cities is an impressive sight, because of its overabundance of vehicles and often-spectacular graphical effects. But after you play for a while, you'll realize that all of its visual details don't amount to very much. The game's science-fiction scenery may hold some players' attention, but the gameplay will probably frustrate most everyone else.
