25 to Life

It’s not often a game like 25 to Life comes along. A game so lame and insulting that it makes you want to reformat your hard drive after uninstalling it, just to get the stench off the platters.

Crap shooters have been around since the birth of PC gaming, but blatant rip-off titles like this GTA-wannabe deserve to be shunned, renounced, and burned in a fiery pit for the abomination they are.

You’ll play three different characters as you progress through this third-person shooter—two gangsters and one police officer—all intertwined in a cheesy tale of betrayal and revenge. The variation in how each character’s story plays out is breathtaking. You start as a character named Freeze, and in the very first level you slaughter hundreds of cops. Next you play as a cop, slaughtering hundreds of bad guys. Then, you are another gangster who has to slaughter hundreds of bad guys, and so on and so forth.

The levels are so incredibly linear and repetitive that it’s laughable and boring. You move forward, kill everyone you see, pick up the floating health pack, turn the next corner, and repeat, until the silly and profanity-laden cutscene arrives. The entire six-hour experience is like this. Once you’ve played this game for five minutes, you’ve seen everything it has to offer.

The multiplayer experience is thankfully better than the single-player, but that’s not saying much. It’s essentially team deathmatch, where you and your posse run around trying to kill everyone on the other team. It’s reminiscent of early Quake deathmatch, or any other rudimentary online shooter.

The real treat is that when you accomplish side objectives in the single-player portion of the game (such as 12 head shots in one level, for example), you’re awarded special jewelry and other accoutrements in multiplayer, so other players will recognize your skill. Sadly, the interface is so awkward that just entering a server is a chore.

We also experienced several bugs, including vertigo-inducing screen-spinning, audio bugs, and cutscenes playing way too fast to comprehend.

Need we even bother saying that you shouldn’t buy this game?

Month Reviewed: April 2006

Verdict: 2

URL: www.25tolife.com