Urban Chaos
It's the future, and the whole Y2K phenomenon has sent a number of Union City gangs into a killing frenzy. You play the role of D'Arci, a go-getter rookie cop with an eye for trouble and zero tolerance for crap. DArci is quickly sucked into a deadly blood feud, while receiving the occasional tip-off from Roper, a grizzled ex-soldier (who becomes playable later on in the game).
Gameplay-wise, Urban Chaos is a hybrid of Tomb Raider and the aforementioned Double Dragon - you'll leap from building to building and slide down cables just as frequently as you bust heads. Missions are somewhat non-linear, with an extra side-story thrown in here and there for good measure. Meeting certain people (or killing them) triggers gameplay events that allow you to progress, and a global positioning system keeps you pointing in the right direction.
The over-the-shoulder camera reveals some similarities with Eidos' Lara Croft cash cow, but to be honest, the running-and-jumping portion of Urban Chaos is superior to any Tomb Raider game. The environment that serves as your stomping grounds is pretty impressive - you get free run of a working city, complete with traffic, pedestrians, and thug-infested back alleys. Dead leaves and discarded newspapers are spread over the landscape, and dashing through the city sends them sailing airborne and fluttering to the ground. On certain missions, you can hop into unlocked vehicles and go for a joyride, mowing down any fools who manage to get in your way - or you can opt to ram fire hydrants, which festively blast water into the air. The only downside to the mayhem is the thick layer of black fog that obstructs your view at all times - it's the ol' Turok-style pea-soup effect doubling as fog, and doesn't do much for immersiveness.
While the gameworld looks cool enough, the fighting portion leaves a lot to be desired - a bad thing, considering that seventy percent of the game consists of brawling. The tutorial introduces you to a weak-ass combat system with unresponsive controls. While executing triple-kick combos and special moves is near-nigh impossible, simply throwing your opponents to the ground and arresting them is dead simple, and there's never any need to go for the flashy Jackie Chan stuff. Another annoyance is that when you're knocked down, it takes a good ten seconds to get back up, and the various hooligans you fight enjoy stomping you in the gut whilst you're incapacitated.
As the game progresses, you can snag shotguns and machine guns from downed enemies, and then the game takes off a bit - popping lead into a bad guy is much easier than going hand-to-hand. But despite the addition of some half-heartedly scripted cut-scenes, the rinse-lather-repeat gameplay gets old rather quickly, and you'll be wishing for more variety by the tenth mission.
Urban Chaos also suffers a major case of consoleitis, featuring incredibly blocky character models that would be better suited to a PlayStation than a high-end PC. But Urban Chaos' biggest sin is that you can never save your game during a mission. You'd think that by now, developers would finally get it into their thick skulls that PC gamers despise this challenge-adding "feature." Give us a break.
At the end of the day, Urban Chaos provides a few hours of slightly enjoyable gameplay, but gets more and more tedious with each passing mission. If the fighting controls were more compelling, or the missions gave you more to do than beat up everyone in sight, Urban Chaos might have been a strong action contender. Ah well, back to Double Dragon.