by: John Olin

September 02, 2005

187 Ride or Die tells the story of a reluctant urban hero named Buck, a young man living a thug's life seething with money, fast cars and beautiful women - with danger lurking around every corner. Set in the underworld of Los Angeles, Buck must defend the territory of his mentor Dupree from a menacing nemesis and his gang of bandit roughriders, led by Cortez, who are determined to take control of the streets. The game is funny enough, a car-combat game set up in the streets. Basically you have a racing section that takes a part of GTA, which is done by GTA better by the way, and then you have derby destruction combat. The result is basically “Gangstas and Mario Kart”.

The game starts off in the first four races in nearly identical areas, switching it up to a SUV, and then goes back to sports car with you dropping mines. The mine parts might take you one or two times due to the absurdity of it, but once you get in front you get an easy lead over everyone else. In the mine part and in many of the parts there is no sense of urgency as it lets you start over even in the race after you have blown up. After awhile it gets even more like Mario Kart and Twisted Metal when the idea isn’t to race but rather destroy. It is a pretty neat concept at first—use the shotgun to hurt the guy on the top, and after you get him switch to the AK-47 and destroy the vehicle. The only problem is, you end up finding yourself looking for health packs after you get shot a certain amount of times or else you can’t shoot at them. This will go on forever, and the computer players themselves also will look for health packs, which are plentiful for them as well. Every so often I would get a glitch that would make the camera pan across the road—which was extremely offsetting. Eventually, the cops will chase you and that is pretty fun at first but like most of the game becomes extremely repetitive after a short while. The reason for this might not even be that it is all the same, but rather the developers did nothing to heighten the situation. Games like this have to have you on edge, and even though I would have difficulties at certain parts, due to how the game plays, I didn’t have this. Another interesting thing is when you or someone else’s vehicle blows up the game slows down and turns to black and white, showing a effect similar to “Burnout 3” but not done as well.

The controls are pretty easy—left trigger brakes, right accelerates, Y switches weapon, A gives you nitrous, and X and B lets you fire in front or in back of you. The nitrous is a good addition, but it is to easily gained by simply sliding around a corner on the road. The multiplayer in this game is basically what you would expect—1-2 people on a system can go against each other in a Mario Kart type race, or fight each other in a derby. Apparently, you can also have co-op play with one guy driving the car, and the other controlling the guns on Xbox Live. Anytime I tried to play the game online no one was playing so I really couldn’t test that out. The multiplayer, if you can get someone to play with you is probably the most fun you will have in the game though.

When I first started hearing the dialogue I almost turned it off. It is so ridiculously cliché that you would rather laugh at the stereotypes than shake your head at them. Half of the crap you won’t even hear anyone say out on the streets. They try to give you some sort of authentic “urban experience” but the dialogue comes out sounding very contrived. Guerilla Black, a clone of the late-great Notorious B.I.G. but not half as good of a rapper plays a voice in the game as well as the soundtrack. All of the music you hear sound scrambled with no real direction to them, giving a washed out feeling to the game. The in-game audio is well enough and does a good job, but the overall package is still extremely averaged out.

Visually the game is extremely rough around the edges, but it is still presented well enough. The cut-scenes with the ear aching dialogue are modeled nicely, but the quality of them is somewhat grainy which is extremely strange. The in-game visuals you have a game that is trying to reproduce what Need for Speed looks like but it doesn’t succeed. The glare and reflections on the vehicles are generically done with no real detail to them. The environments have absolutely no variety in them other than maybe going the other way in the track in the neighborhood you are in. They also don’t exactly vary in paths, as it feels that you are continuously going in a circle. The car models are all very generic, and give the game even less authenticity since they are cars designed originally by UbiSoft. It doesn’t even seem like the team tried to model them after any popular models.

In the end, all the machine guns, sawed-offs, and rocket launchers can’t save this title from trying to be that edgy title that no one wants. With bad dialogue, a goofy premise, and loose gameplay there is nothing to keep you coming. It might be worth the rent if you are really bored and need a car-combat game in your life but otherwise just wait for something much better from UbiSoft.

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Overall this game is a little below what it could have been. It tries to do to many things at once, and ultimately it looks like they took a bunch of the top racing genre titles of the past three years and slapped them together. If you are looking for a car destruction game go back to Twisted Metal or Mario Kart. Otherwise, if you think you will be getting an Xbox 360 wait for Full Auto instead.

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