stopped playing Crime Life: Gang Wars 🌕🌕🌑🌑🌑
I feel like this could've been a solid game if they changed a few aspects. Jumping members of other gangs and fighting for territory will never not be fun. It plays on inherent tribalism, you always wanna "rep your set" and do side-activities related to it because you identify with the gang and want to see it grow and develop. Furthermore, the combat system is quite decent, and the scripted finishers are brutal (though suffer from a lack of visual damage system).

But there are a few flaws that, in my opinion, completely ruin this game.

First of all, the camera is god-awful. You always want to see what's ahead of you, but it's pointing to the ground. I get that there are games with such camera where it works fine, but this gameplay seems completely unadapted for it. I don't see any reason why a normal 3rd-person perspective couldn't have been implemented. Furthermore, it gets stuck on objects and snaps back in the opposite direction, often fucking up whatever you're busy doing at the moment (most likely fighting).

The second problem is that it's open-world, but you can't sprint or drive cars which are everywhere for some reason. The cars are driven by actual NPCs that can enter and exit cars, but you can't. Like, if I can't drive, at least don't fucking tease me with them.

And what is up with it being open-world when there's hardly anything of interest in said open-world.

Again though, I have to stress, that it would've been perfectly fine as a B-title if it just fixed its camera. All my other complaints are less important.

What's strange also is that the game starts with "any similarities to real people are coincidental", but it features actual D12 members in it (???). Except for Eminem, who is the only D12 member anybody would actually care about. And D12 (without Eminem) wrote the theme song for this game, and it's actually good. It's that early 2000s D12, when they were still sick. But the rest of the soundtrack is really weird. There's some UK hip-hop, which I actually like, as I'm a big grime-head, but I don't get why put it in a clearly American gangsta rap inspired setting. And then there's like German rap (in German), and some pop music as well (???). I just don't get why. There's plenty of good broke rappers in America whose music could've been licensed, which is something a lot of similarly-themed games do.