25 to Life is a lifelessly generic shooter that, at
times, feels like Max Payne without the fun.
In 25 to Life, you can play as either a cop or a
gangster. Set in the heart of today's cities, the game lets you experience the
gritty lifestyles of police task forces or, as a gangster, survive the local
neighborhood thugs while fighting your way up the ranks.
Throughout the early and mid '90s, there was a
boom in movies that took place in "the hood." This urban-themed movie
trend really kicked off due to the success of John Singleton's Boyz n the Hood.
After that, the "me too" phenomenon kicked in, and there was suddenly
a glut of gangsta movies--the quality of each steadily declining the further in
you got. The same phenomenon is happening with games. While games like Grand
Theft Auto: San Andreas stand out as Boyz n the Hood or Juice equivalents,
we're also getting our video game equivalents of junk like Tales From the Hood
or (shudder) Phat Beach. 25 to Life is the latest in line, and this
third-person shooter is, in a word, dumb.
25 to Life is an overly simple third-person
shooter that has a story-driven single-player mode and a team-based multiplayer
mode. The single-player starts you out in the role of Freeze, a gangster who's
trying to get out of the game and escape with his wife and son. You're asked to
do "one last job," which, of course, goes spectacularly wrong and
messes everything up. You'll also play as a cop surrounded by dirty cops and as
a gang leader who gets banished to Mexico only to end up taking over the
organized-crime scene there by force. The story is all over the place, and
since the playable characters are to a certain extent connected, you're never
really sure if you're playing as a good guy or a bad guy. But the narrative is
so lame that you probably won't care.
The single-player action boils down to hiding
around corners, popping out, and mowing down as many enemies as you can. You'll
come across a bunch of different weapons--including pistols, dual pistols,
submachine pistols, assault rifles, and even a LAW rocket launcher or two. In
case you're silly enough to get up close, you'll also be packing a melee
weapon, such as a knife or a hammer or something. There's almost always enough
ammo around to prevent you from having to turn to your melee weapons, and there's
usually enough health around--at least on the default difficulty setting--to
prevent the game from ever being too difficult, assuming you're careful and
don't stand out in the open. An onscreen radar displays enemy positions, which
is good for letting you know when you're safe and when you've got trouble
coming around the corner.
The environments vary, giving you outdoor and
indoor levels to play in. You'll run through some Los Angeles-like streets, rob
a bank and a casino, run through the streets of Tijuana, and break out of a
prison during a riot. There's a good amount of variety, though none of the
environments are particularly noteworthy. Most simply contain singular paths
that take you from start to finish as you blast your way through the game's short
story mode.
As you play through single-player, you'll be
unlocking new custom items for use in the multiplayer. The team-based
multiplayer is cops versus criminals for up to 16 players in four modes. War is
your basic team deathmatch. Raid puts the criminals on the defensive as they
protect their stash from the cops. Robbery puts a series of loot items on the
map, which criminals must steal and return to their base while the cops try to
prevent them from doing so. Tag pits criminals against criminals in a graffiti
war. The taggable walls act as control points, and it's up to your team to hold
down as much of the map as possible to earn points. If you like, you can
disable or limit respawns to adjust the finality of death.
While the multiplayer setup's focus on team
games makes it resemble Sony's popular SOCOM series at a glance, you won't find
any of that game's tactical elements here. Death comes quickly if you expose
yourself to enemy fire for too long. Overall, it's a simple mode that doesn't
beat out its competition on any of the three platforms.
25 to Life is available on the PC, the Xbox, and
the PlayStation 2, and the experience is roughly the same across all three
platforms. The PC offers slightly better control, with its standard
mouse-and-keyboard setup, but the Xbox and the PS2 versions control just fine.
However, a bug in the PC version caused all of the music to constantly skip,
forcing us to disable it. The Xbox and the PS2 versions come with a soundtrack
CD, though it is conveniently missing all of the game's best music, while the
PC version comes with a Freeze playing card for use with the collectible card
game Street Warriors.
Graphically, the game isn't much to look at. The
bland environments and generic character animation stick out, and the rag
doll-like physics of falling bodies look cheap, especially when dead bodies
clip right through solid objects. The sound effects are similarly
standard--you've heard gunfire in a video game before, right? The voice acting
is passable, though the script's low quality negates any of the game's better
voice actors. The soundtrack is a quality mix of hip-hop, both old and new.
It's good, which makes the PC version's music bug all the more disappointing.
Containing classics from Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy ("Black
Steel in the Hour of Chaos" plays during the prison riot scene, which is a
perfect fit, even if your in-game motive doesn't match the song's), it's the
high point of the entire package.
While 25 to Life works as intended, the third-person
shooting doesn't differentiate itself in any way, making it feel like a sad Max
Payne clone--lacking that game's style and acrobatic shot-dodge maneuvers. The
multiplayer is functional, yet thoroughly unexciting. Even if you're a fan of
the subject matter, you could certainly do better than 25 to Life. 
Processor= 1.4GHz
RAM= 256MB
Graphics= 64MB
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