Gangland Review (no fat)

Game Description

Offering a great mix of genres rolled into one, in a highly hyped Mafia-type storyline, Gangland takes control of your computer screen.

Cutting edge innovation gives gamers a myriad of options to toy with, with gradual increases in the games levels to give a sense of accomplishment. In a matter of hours you will go from small city scrub, to big city kingpin.

Gangland Story

The games main character is Mario Mangano, one of five brothers who live in Palermo, Sicily. One night your brother Chico is found dead, and the suspected murderers are your other three brothers.

It isn’t long until they flee to Paradise City in the New World, the same world you are soon sent to apprentice under your Uncle Vincenzo. Revenge is on your mind, and with the help and tutelage of your Uncle, it should promise to be sweet.

Gangland Gameplay

With only one goon at your disposal to start out, the usual level grinding that accompanies many old and modern RPG’s is apparent in Gangland as well. The starting missions are pretty straightforward and help you to get a feel for the game, a little bit of extorting here and a hit there. Nothing too heavy to begin with, and a good way to gain some easy power.

Regular missions are handed out to advance the plot, while challenge missions are more likely to give you bonuses. The extra advantages of completing them can prove huge, such as extra additions of new units including the deadly ninjas.

The large pool of help at your disposal is needed, considering that every potential person you pass on the street may attack you. The games AI may frustrate more strategic players, but will appeal to the run and gun types immediately.

None of the missions are really that hard, it’s the random citizens, cops, and mobsters which make simple tasks a chore. Everyone seems to have been in Gangland, and it never really is clear why some people attack you.

Players can always opt to take the power route and try to control a large portion of things, like gunshops and chopshops. That’s favors, and lots of bullets for you to spread out among your henchmen.

However, the real kicker is the fact that, after advancing so far in the plot, moving to another level makes you lose all your men and everything you worked for.

Gangland Henchmen and Controls

The big appeal to Gangland is the large variety of help you can acquire, from any of the restaurants you have taken over. Although the type of help for hire is randomized, controlling more restaurants will improve your chances of getting who you want.

Gunmen, Bouncers, Streetgirls, Big Mommas, Bazooka troops (and more) are all available to players as they progress through the game. With each unit having its strength and weaknesses, the strategy part comes strongly into play. So, whether or not you complete the next mission will depend on the company you keep around you.

The 3-d map works surprisingly well, with movable camera angles so you can best see the action. The standard mouse setup for this type of game is there, using a Warcraft 2 type setup that is non-intrusive to the common PC user.

With one of the many cheap gaming mouse’s that are available today, Gangland can be played conveniently from one without keyboard input. But even with such a simple setup, bad car controls and physics makes it a chore to drive in the game. The driving limitations in Gangland can go from minor to completely frustrating, especially in timed missions.

Gangland Graphics

The cities are lively and bustling, unfortunately the nice character models that are used are reused to an insane degree. There will be many times where gamers will confuse their henchmen with regular city folk.

But aside from the recycled graphics, besides the citizens walking the street there really isn’t much life in Gangland. The people are there, but they just seem to wander aimlessly, and to compound that fact even more there is no busy traffic in the streets. That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, and is far from an oversight by the developer.

Gangland Sound

The tunes are nice to listen to, but don’t go with the theme of the game. An unusual use of rock is used for fighting scenes, which may throw some off in the beginning. Henchmen give decent voiceovers after you issue them a command, but since you will be issuing commands most of the game it gets rather old quickly.

Really the voice acting doesn’t have a place in the game, couple that with the rock and it almost sounds like it was made for a completely different project.

Gangland - Summing up

The action adventure genre’s erstwhile attempts at recreating gang life and mafias if here to stay…GTA has made sure of that. However, the games on this theme have been aiming in the dark…more misses than hits.

Gangland is another such project. The creativity is there, but for some strange reason it all seems rushed. Challenging missions are a plus, but the lack of a good saving point makes it a pain to play hour-long missions and then fail.

Online support is limited, and at this point and most of the time it’s a pretty barren Gangland online. The only way to find a player would be local LAN setups, which really takes out the fun of the online element with a stranger.

Cars are hard to drive, unit AI is no different than citizens with the random gunplay. Cool features like having a wife and kid are tacked on and it would have made a game itself with just the wife and kid feature, the coolness of having your kids grow up and help run your business should have been explored more.

The last saving grace in this Strategy/Sim/RPG would’ve been the level gaining your main character does, and how he benefits and has access to more of the games features. But amazingly, after you have completed one of the games main missions you have to start from scratch. Not your main characters level, but all of your henchmen, and everything you worked hard for, gone. Not many players are sure why it is this way, and it really spells out a bad RPG experience.

With all the great promise Gangland showed, it comes up short simply because it didn’t deliver on its core gameplay.

Gangland Cost

Gangland retails for $16.99US, at the time of writing.