One look at the box of Escape from Paradise City reveals a tell tale sign of a gaming disaster. The cheap art, back blurb filled clichés about dirty characters and a dystopian world and the name primed to set up a dozen flimsy punch lines. Thankfully, the game inside is a lot better than what the first impressions would make you believe, though Sirius Games has not exactly done path breaking work with this action role-playing game about cleaning up a crime ridden city. The game plays and feels like a sequel to the developer’s previous game, Gangland. But at the same time, the leveling up, scrapping and thug management rolls along in a bearable, if formulaic, fashion. Surprises are few and far between when it comes to the story and basic gameplay.
Paradise City is basically a run-down disaster zone where thugs and ganglords are running wild and creating a chaos. This attracts the attention of NSA agent, Walker J.Kovacs. To take charge of this crime reeking metro, he enlists a trio of criminals, whom you must guide through the game’s 16 chapters .Most of the solo part is structured like a Z-grade flick from the 70’s. The three heroes fit in to the standard RPG stereotypes, Nick Porter is a bank robber who is proficient with firearms, and Angel Vargas is an agile street fighter who prefers brass knuckles and knives. Fat Boris Chekhov is a corrupt cop who simply fires his pistol before cowering behind hired muscles. You got the melee fighter, the ranged fighter and the sly guy who doesn’t have to get his hand dirty to get the job done. These characters are seen before in, ok just about every RPG game that has ever been released.
The game also has a cool multiplayer mode in which you can team up with a friend to take over a territory or even battle it out against each other, don’t expect to find too many guys playing online though. Mechanics are pretty basic and routine, though it must be admitted that most of the gameplay features are filled out well. The three characters gain experience points and top add on attributes such as body, agility and charisma each time they level up. Boris really changes things up on the way you distribute the skill points. This is because his average combat skills force you to meet goals with more trickery and tactical use of allies. The characters also have access to special powerups which are meant to show you’re fast becoming a crime kingpin with friends in high places. As you go about taking over neighborhoods and businesses, you earn points that are needed to call up these handy abilities. Most of these help you alter the city in some way or another. For instance you can cause a neighborhood lockdown to clear the streets, call for street medicine which summons a medic who heals all allied units and even call for air strike. If you can ignore the game’s repetitive gameplay and visuals, you could still say that the game was better than the first glance.
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