~Saturn Reviews- CrimeWave~
CrimeWave
Here's a title that could've been a real winner, but
remarkably fails in almost all areas.
The game is CrimeWave, and was created by Edios (Makers on the astounding title "Tomb Raider").
In this game, you are a road-bound bounty hunter, waiting for your target to appear on screen. Once he does, an arrow indicates your direction, and off you go after your prey. Go too slow, and your target will escape, or worse yet, your timer will count down to zero, and your game will be over. If you do manage to catch, and destroy your target, you are awarded with new levels once you obtain the desired "Mek" points which are given after each sucessful kill (Points can also be taken away if you kill innocent vehicles).
So what didn't I like about it you ask? Well basically everything.
For starters, the game has terrible load times. I'm not talking about the load time before the game begins (Which are bad too), I'm talking about the game in progress load times. It seems that every few minutes, the game must pause to load more data into RAM. This is an extremely annoying factor in the game, and should've been addresed before the game was released. From such a strong development house as Edios, I expected more.
Another thing was the balance of the
game. I mean, getting the first few vehicles before going to a
new level was easy, the last was always extremely tough. I don't
mind tough games, but this one was usually unfair. You could
chase your boss, and the timer would run out before you could
even reach him. Or, if you couldn't catch him, and a new boss
apears, your timer would be where the last one left off.
Sometimes I'd have something like 5 seconds to chase, and destroy
a boss. This is an impossible feat, and totally unfair.
The game looks fairly decent, nothing that screams 32 bit, but none the less still apealing. The problem is that it looks (and feels) pretty much the same through all levels. All that I tried anyway (I gave up way before seeing the ending). There just wasn't anything there to make you really want to see the next level. I usually don't mind the top-down viewing of the playfield. I generally like this kind of view, but in this game it doesn't work too well. It was too hard to tell where you were going, and what innocent vehicles would be in your way. I found myself constantly bumping into these innocents, which totally destroyed the fun for me.
The game does have a few neat weapons. It was always a blast to fire multiple rockets at my target. In the end though, the few it had wasn't near enough to save this title.
Personally, I can't recommend this game to anyone. It has a few good traits, but those are far outweighted by the bad.
RATINGS
GRAPHICS 75%
SOUND 70%
GAMEPLAY 62%
ORIGINALITY 75%
REPLAY VALUE 55%
OVERALL 67%
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