CrimeCraft was a nice idea in planning. Think of it as an amalgamation of a couple different game genres: mashing up the crime, free world elements of GTA and Saint’s Row with first-person shooter gameplay of Halo, and finishing it off with the MMORPG integration of the World of Warcraft series. Seems like a good idea, however the execution is a mutha.

The basic premise is this: a worldwide economic depression caused civilization to collapse; now the U.S. is in anarchy with individual cities and regions controlled by warring corporations and you’re in the last remaining “free city”. Think the plot to Jericho. It’s nice to see a developer break from the norm occasionally and have MMORPG in a setting that doesn’t include Orcs and Elves.

Based on gameplay, controls, and graphics this game’s a winner. Being a PC game, of course there’s an adjustment to controls being mapped to the keyboard. Growing up on a controller in my hands, this always makes for difficult transition, even if I’m told that’s the best way to play these types of games. Graphically, CrimeCraft is top notch, but that’s more of an indictment of the recycled Unreal Tournament III engine it’s running on. If you’ve played Gears of War or Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe (which ran the same engine), you’ll appreciate what you’re working with here. While essentially a First-Person Shooter (FPS), the developers utilize a third person camera angle, ala Resident Evil 4’s gameplay. It may upset FPS purist, but for novices (like myself) it actually improved the gameplay so you’re not getting blindsided during firefights.

However, the key selling point of this game, action and combat, CrimeCraft is severely lacking. The player versus player (PvP) combat (when it happens) is hella entertaining. Problem is, you can go three to five minutes before coming across any type of action. I get that this game incorporated RPG upgrading elements, but really, players don’t wanna spend most of their time performing constant menial leveling up tasks before advancing back into combat.  The main content in the game revolves around map scenarios – kill a team of 10 players, kill a team of 10 AI controlled NPCs, wash, rinse, repeat. Hardcore MMORPG players will be extremely disappointed by the Player vs. Environment (PvE) gameplay as they simply use the same PvP maps sprinkled with AI opponents that have respawn timers.

CrimeCraft delivers what you’d expect fro man ambitious game trying to be all things to all types of gamers, but fail to execute on one great component. Not a bad first effort but far from revolutionizing the MMORPG genre that it set out to do. –A. Kennedy