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Gangs Of London [PSP]
Posted by FoxDemon2k on 10. 2006f December 2006, 21:49
Repetitive story mode, bland missions, gameplay issues and horrible AI. Stay away from this one.
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At the start of the game you choose one of five gangs to represent. Each gang has its own reason reason for waging war on the other gangs, from avenging the death of a loved one to the loss of something important to them or the destruction of personal property. The stories are told in a graphic novel format. For more than 60 missions you will be fighting against the other gangs and taking over their turf. You can choose what mission to take, depending on which gang you want to destroy first. To completely defeat a gang you have to first deplete it's strength then launch a massive assault against it's leader.
This game is all about all out gang warfare, therefore you will be up against a large number of opponents all by yourself most of the time. Some times you will have up to three members with you to help you on a few missions. Your squadmembers will be equiped in different ways, one might have short range weapons and the others a automatic rifle and hand grenades. You are able to switch between your squadmembers whenever you feel like it. If you are controlling one of them then die, you will switched to another squadmember. Off course you don't want to lose your characters so, it's important to get behind cover or take a human shield, whatever you prefer. If you get hurt you have three recharges, each having a different strenght. You can heal yourself or one of your fellow gangsters, which is important because you need atleast one to survive to complete a mission. The game is extremly repetitive and not a lot of fun. The difference between the different gangs are very small, so small that it just doesn't matter which one you choose except that evert gang uses different weapons. The experience system isn't any good either, it is suppose to make your gangsters more skilled. That doesn't seem to work much, since you wont see much improvement in their abillities at all. Also, there is no actual penalty for having one of them die in a mission. They will appear all good again in the next mission without any loss of abillities or anything, which turns them into a human shield if you need it, instead of someone you want to keep alive.
You can give orders your gangsters, but it will for the most past be ignored and they will do what they want to instead. Which more often than not leads to their death, and endangers you at the same time. Instead of standing behind cover while shooting at your enemy they will run into the line of fire then start firing their weapon. The A.I in the game is pretty dumb, for instance. In stealth missions an enemy can fire his weapon in a room, and no-one of his comrades in the room next by will come to investigate. Often enemies wont start attacking you even though they see you, because you have to trigger their attack. Another thing that is annoying is that when they haven't ben "triggered" they have unlimited health, so therefore you can't kill them and forces you to move forward when it really shouldn't be necessary. If you look past the gameplay issues, the stories are flawed also, with their repetitive play. There are three kind of driving missions, most of them you will be able to finish in about 5 minutes time. The missions are mostly run away from someone, destory a car or deliver someone or something somewhere. What makes it exceptionally horrible is the fact that the driving controls are abysmal. No matter if you have a large or small car you will have trouble maneuvering it through the traffic filled streets. The assault and ifiltration missions are not much better, narrow halls and wider rooms, every place looks the same and the enemy wont do much to stop you from crushing them. You will quickly realize you are playing the same game over and over five times only with different voices and weapons. Besides story mode you can play free roam, where you can go about the 25 square miles of London which you don't really get to explore with the story mode. Within free roam there are different things to do like Speed Trap, Riot Control and 4 Weeks Later, all suffering from the same old problems. The more interesting things are London Tourist where you have to travel around in the city taking photos of landmarks. Even though it is the most interesting thing to do in free roam it wont keep your attention for very long. You can go to The Pub, there place to play a lot of different smaller games like Darts, Skittles, US and UK 8-Ball and an arcade machine of the game Snake. It's fun for a while, but gets old fast.
Then there is a Gang Battle mode, which is basicly a Gangs of London style game of Risk. Instead of having a map of the world you have a map of London, moving your troops around taking one territory after another. And you can buy cards of three different levels to help you take over different territories. This mode is okay, but like the rest of the game gets old fast...
In conclusion this is a very dissapointing game. The game suffers from repetitive missions and gameplay, a horrible AI, and other modes that just dosn't justify a purchase. Just don't buy this game, it is not a good game.
Score:
Gameplay 4
Graphics 6
Sound 7
Value 4
Tilt 2
Overall: 4.0
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