PlayStation 2

Urban Chaos: Riot Response

In the real world, people live in fear. We live in fear of an unseen enemy that doesn't just live across the sea, but in our very neighborhoods. An enemy that hates us and wants to kill our friends and families over a dispute that very few understand and jealousy of our beloved American way. As a people, we live in fear of our neighbors, of the teenagers on the street, and of our fellow passengers at the airport. We lock our car doors, we hold our loved one's hand tight, and we live in suspicion of our coworkers and neighbors, lest they be part of the problem and not the solution. In our terrified society, the local news serves not as a source of information, but as a tool to control the population, disseminating distrust and fear through shocking corporate-sponsored headlines.

As someone that's pretty much bored to tears with the FPS genre, I personally found Urban Chaos to be a breath of fresh air. The game plays like every other FPS does, but the CPU controlled buddies and different mission objectives help keep the gunplay fresh. Furthermore, the live action newsbreaks and in-game conversations kept me entertained even when I was backtracking to earlier missions in order to unlock better weapons.

The clamor of over violence in videogames spiked back in January 2006 when Eidos' 25 To Life was protested by police groups angry that gamers could, without consequence, shoot police in the game. The general media, as usual, saw an emotionally charged topic and reacted with typical aggression by feeding on the general public's overreactions. But few journalists followed that story beyond the normal trappings, and if they did, they would be honing in on Urban Chaos: Riot Response, the new PS2 and Xbox first-person shooter from the relatively new development team, Rocksteady Games.

It went through three different names in its development, but Urban Chaos: Riot Response is a fitting name for this action-packed first-person shooter. Not to be confused with the third-person action game that appeared on the PC, Dreamcast, and PlayStation some years back, this Urban Chaos is an extremely violent and entertaining take on the familiar cops-versus-criminals themed first-person shooter. It's campy in its excess, but if you're just looking for some fast-paced, mindless shooting, you can't go wrong with Urban Chaos.

Like Cold Winter and Project Snowblind, before it, Urban Chaos is a nice distraction from the FPS giants. It's by no means a blockbuster that can suck away years of your life, but it offers up memorable thrills that you won't find anywhere else. It's well worth a look.

Urban Chaos: Riot Response is an old-school mindless shoot-em-up in many ways, but it adds a few interesting gameplay mechanics to keep things fresh. A maniacal gang that calls themselves the Burners is attacking a clearly NYC-inspired city, and they're prone to shooting, stabbing, and burning everything in their path. The game does a great job of presenting an environment that truly seems to be the epicenter of complete anarchy. Urban Chaos: Riot Response is certainly fun for a bit, but most gamers will probably get tired of the monotonous "rescue X many civilians" objectives later in the game. Definitely worth checking out for hardcore fans of mindless shoot-em-ups, but most casual fans of the genre will see everything worth seeing in a rental period.

Urban Chaos does manage to do what many games can't. Through rewards, constant action, and little bonuses like getting to lay into enemies with a chainsaw, it keeps you playing even after you've seen all it can do.

A condition de le trouver à petit prix, Urban Chaos : Violence Urbaine se révèle être un passe-temps tout à fait honorable, bourrin mais original, souffrant malheureusement d'un gameplay qui n'explore pas suffisamment ses propres idées et d'un level design trop linéaire.

The level design is patchy, too, with several drawn-out rescue scenarios forcing you to traipse around the same darkened smoky environments with little guidance of where to go, and thermal goggles that you'll barely use. Occasionally you'll rely on the help of willing firemen, who'll (using a simple d-pad command interface) chop through doors and barricades, put out fires, carry the injured and yank open shutters, but you'll often wonder why the game didn't just give you the choice of doing all of that yourself - you are the ultimate one-man army, after all.

The game's story unfolds through live-action newscasts between the levels. There's a lot of talk of terrorists and the controversy over the brutal methods you'll be using to take them down. At first, this seems like a bit of Verhoeven-esque satire, but before long, it becomes apparent that the whole thing is, in fact, perfectly straight-faced -- just very hammy. In fact, it's almost embarrassing enough to pass for actual television news. There could've been a message here -- and when a game comes this close to actually invoking 9/11, you'll probably be looking for that message, but it's just not there.

Terrorists are a bad lot, especially when they look like rejects from Rockstar Games' Manhunt. It seems that multiple gangs in the city have taken up arms against the police, mainly incited by a fittingly named group of thugs called the Burners. The Burners, as you would probably expect, have a penchant for fire, and tote around molotov cocktails as their main means of attack. You take on the role of a season cop that's been enlisted in a new and controversial anti-terrorism group dubbed T-Zero (Zero Tolerance). It's up to you, and your allies, to quell the uprising, no matter the cost.