Game #1183: Crash City Mayhem

 Driving, crashing and a bit of spying.

 And now for something different, Crash City Mayhem is not your average driving game, as it's a mission based arcade game in which you drive a car. Sorta.

 The game is disappointingly short, as it's made up of only 6 missions. To make up for that, it features a rather bothersome difficulty system. For example, you can't unlock chapter 3 until you've beaten the first two missions on both difficulty setting, and you can't unlock the third difficulty setting until you've beaten the final mission on the second difficulty setting. There are about six difficulty settings, and the game is meant to be replayed on all of them. Yeah, it's kinda cheap. In the game's defense... the difficulty settings start adding wrinkles into the missions. Difficulty 2 only makes the time limit shorter, but, for example, on the third difficulty, the first mission has two vans you must check instead of one, then mission 2 has five data points to collect instead of only two, now mission 3 requires you to hit a certain maximum speed in order to finish it. I stopped at the third difficulty setting, but I'm willing to bet further increments keep toying around with the concept.

 The game has quite a few different vehicles, and it gets a bit wild. At first you've got about four cars and a scooter, but then you'll unlock a Bus and even a tank. As you play different difficulties you'll unlock items you can equip on your vehicles, to add perks such as jumping or turbos, as well as the ability to customize the color of your vehicle and tune its different stats. Not bad!
 

 The gameplay is fast and loose, and I love the high level of destruction you can cause. It's very arcadey, and I enjoyed this type of goal-based objective. It's pretty much always you against the clock, and while most missions usually end on a race against the clock to get somewhere, there's usually other mini objectives before it, such as collecting stuff or chasing a vehicle. It's fun! You also have to be way of your health bar, as you can lose the mission if your car gets totaled. Another thing to keep in mind is that there are no checkpoints. Run out of time or health... and it's game over.

 For as fun as the game is, controls are rather subpar, as it can be tough to steer your vehicle at times. And while the game looks pretty rudimentary, framerate issues are common. Then there's the fourth mission... it's the longest mission, clocking over 10 minutes, and it's about tailing a person. If you touch her or the vehicle she is on, it's instant game over. Unlike the rest of the game, most of it is very slow paced, so much so that at times I'd get distracted watching something else... and touch the car. Forcing me to restart the entire mission. About a third in, the person can either go by subway or helicopter, which is fine once you understand how the mission works, but when I played it the first few times... at first I kept driving since I didn't know where the person was going. And I didn't get it, I didn't understand where she disappeared to. On my next attempt, since I knew she'd go to the roof and drive the helicopter, I quickly drove up and.... now she took the subway. I didn't even know that was possible since no other mission has branching paths like this one. And it meant sitting through the slow as molasses initial tailing segment. Mind you, after you understand how the mission plays, this is mostly a nonissue, but it's still very boring. It stands out from the other missions as its the only one without a timer.

 Crash City Mayhem is a good time. It's very low budget, and it shows, so it doesn't have much unique content, it has framerate issues and control could be tighter... but at its core, it's a fun game. At least five out of its six missions are.

 6.0