25 To Life
We finally get some hands-on time with the online multiplayer mode of Eidos and Avalanche's ganger shooter.
Published: July 14, 2005
Cops and Robbers is one of the oldest childhood games most kids will remember. Granted most of those kids will be boys, but it's one of those basic concepts that ingrained in all of us: good vs. bad guys. While most probably opted to be the good guys when they were kids, everyone liked indulging their dark side from time to time, and video games, especially recent ones, are great for allowing us to play as the bad guys without actually having to worry about stuff like jail time or SWAT team rounds being pumped into our chests.
This is the most basic concept behind 25 To Life, Avalanche's literal cops and robbers shooter that has become (much to the delight of publisher Eidos' PR team, we're sure) the new whipping boy for indignant politicians and pissy, uninformed quasi-journalists on TV too pissed off to notice the game isn't being made for kids. In fact, it should be rather obvious that the game isn't for kids given the general nature of what's going on, but we're really going off on a tangent that is best reserved for some other time and place and probably voiced with a far more eloquent tongue or fingers than we're capable of.
Given that we're adults and we like to shoot at things, we took to a recent four-level online-enabled beta of the game to task and we've come back with some basic impressions. After registering the usual username and password and logging in with our profile (using the nigh-ubiquitous GameSpy service), we were able to goof around with a couple of the customization options before heading into the game.
Each side, criminals and law enforcement have their own preset models you can pick and choose from (apparently there's more intricate customization possible, but it didn't look like we could access it in the build we played), allowing at least a limited amount of choice in how we looked We settled for the hilariously awesome mustachioed Federale Lieutenant as our cop and a smoove cream-suited chain-wearing playah as our gangster (because that's totally who we are).
Other choices included two SWAT uniforms, a blue-suited PD Lieutenant and a bulletproof jack-wearing agent known only as "ATF Badass" for the cops and "DBoy" (who wore a simple pair of jeans, a white t-shirt, black jacket and trucker-style hat), a generic gangster who was going shirtless, a freshly sprung prisoner (he was still wearing his orange prison pants and hid his face with bandana mask) and a suave red/black suited man dubbed Saragosa.
After picking our look from the basic constructs, we dug around, picking our weapons loadout from nearly 50 different options, including rifles, semi-auto and automatic pistols, melee weapons like batons and pipes, and throwable goodies like incendiary or frag grenades and flashbangs. Something that's interesting to note (though we didn't see an especially strong presence in our build) was that the cops will actually have the ability to use real nonlethal options. Oh please let us be able to use a bean bag shotgun ohpleaseohpleaseohplease.
For those interested (and because we went through and painstakingly wrote them all down), here are the weapons choices for each side. If you're the comparing type, you'll notice that there are some exclusives to each:
-Law Enforcement-
:Melee:
Baton, Combat Knife, Tire Iron, Stun Gun, Zapper
:Secondary:
44 Mag, Eagle .50, Glock, 44 Auto, 45 Compact, 45 SD, 9mm Auto, 45 LE, .357 Cal
:Primary:
Shotgun LE, Tac SG, M4, M4c, SWAT Sniper, RSG 1, MP, MP Silenced, MP Auto, MP Micro, MP Micro SD
:Grenade:
Frag, Concussion, Flash, Smoke, Tear Gas, HE
-Criminals-
:Melee:
Bat, Hammer, Tire Iron, Bottle, Big Knife, Butterfly Knife
:Secondary:
Tec 9, 44 Auto, 45 Compact, 9mm, 9mm SD, 9mm Auto, Mac, U21, 9mm Semi-Auto, 45 LE, .357 Cal, Eagle .50
:Primary:
AK, RSG 1, M1A, M4c, MP Auto, U21, MP Micro, MP Micro SD, Sawed-Off Shotgun, Short Barrel Shotgun, Tac SG
:Grenade:
Pipebomb, Smoke, Molotov, HE, Frag
Weapons and look finished up, it was time to go about crafting the most important option of all: our tag. Okay, so it's actually not all that special, and to be honest you can only use the damn things in pre-set spots and our full tag didn't fit in that space (sorry, no TotalPlayStation.com sprayed across Kevlar vests for us, but we're impressed that the full URL actually fit in the create-a-tag screen). The tags allowed for full customization of the base color, the outside border and then some small highlights that gave it a more 3D-ish look to whatever text you plugged in. You'll never see it, but ours was so radicool with all the blue and stuff that you would have freaked if we hit you with it. Oh well.
This is the most basic concept behind 25 To Life, Avalanche's literal cops and robbers shooter that has become (much to the delight of publisher Eidos' PR team, we're sure) the new whipping boy for indignant politicians and pissy, uninformed quasi-journalists on TV too pissed off to notice the game isn't being made for kids. In fact, it should be rather obvious that the game isn't for kids given the general nature of what's going on, but we're really going off on a tangent that is best reserved for some other time and place and probably voiced with a far more eloquent tongue or fingers than we're capable of.
Given that we're adults and we like to shoot at things, we took to a recent four-level online-enabled beta of the game to task and we've come back with some basic impressions. After registering the usual username and password and logging in with our profile (using the nigh-ubiquitous GameSpy service), we were able to goof around with a couple of the customization options before heading into the game.
Each side, criminals and law enforcement have their own preset models you can pick and choose from (apparently there's more intricate customization possible, but it didn't look like we could access it in the build we played), allowing at least a limited amount of choice in how we looked We settled for the hilariously awesome mustachioed Federale Lieutenant as our cop and a smoove cream-suited chain-wearing playah as our gangster (because that's totally who we are).
Other choices included two SWAT uniforms, a blue-suited PD Lieutenant and a bulletproof jack-wearing agent known only as "ATF Badass" for the cops and "DBoy" (who wore a simple pair of jeans, a white t-shirt, black jacket and trucker-style hat), a generic gangster who was going shirtless, a freshly sprung prisoner (he was still wearing his orange prison pants and hid his face with bandana mask) and a suave red/black suited man dubbed Saragosa.
After picking our look from the basic constructs, we dug around, picking our weapons loadout from nearly 50 different options, including rifles, semi-auto and automatic pistols, melee weapons like batons and pipes, and throwable goodies like incendiary or frag grenades and flashbangs. Something that's interesting to note (though we didn't see an especially strong presence in our build) was that the cops will actually have the ability to use real nonlethal options. Oh please let us be able to use a bean bag shotgun ohpleaseohpleaseohplease.
For those interested (and because we went through and painstakingly wrote them all down), here are the weapons choices for each side. If you're the comparing type, you'll notice that there are some exclusives to each:
-Law Enforcement-
:Melee:
Baton, Combat Knife, Tire Iron, Stun Gun, Zapper
:Secondary:
44 Mag, Eagle .50, Glock, 44 Auto, 45 Compact, 45 SD, 9mm Auto, 45 LE, .357 Cal
:Primary:
Shotgun LE, Tac SG, M4, M4c, SWAT Sniper, RSG 1, MP, MP Silenced, MP Auto, MP Micro, MP Micro SD
:Grenade:
Frag, Concussion, Flash, Smoke, Tear Gas, HE
-Criminals-
:Melee:
Bat, Hammer, Tire Iron, Bottle, Big Knife, Butterfly Knife
:Secondary:
Tec 9, 44 Auto, 45 Compact, 9mm, 9mm SD, 9mm Auto, Mac, U21, 9mm Semi-Auto, 45 LE, .357 Cal, Eagle .50
:Primary:
AK, RSG 1, M1A, M4c, MP Auto, U21, MP Micro, MP Micro SD, Sawed-Off Shotgun, Short Barrel Shotgun, Tac SG
:Grenade:
Pipebomb, Smoke, Molotov, HE, Frag
Weapons and look finished up, it was time to go about crafting the most important option of all: our tag. Okay, so it's actually not all that special, and to be honest you can only use the damn things in pre-set spots and our full tag didn't fit in that space (sorry, no TotalPlayStation.com sprayed across Kevlar vests for us, but we're impressed that the full URL actually fit in the create-a-tag screen). The tags allowed for full customization of the base color, the outside border and then some small highlights that gave it a more 3D-ish look to whatever text you plugged in. You'll never see it, but ours was so radicool with all the blue and stuff that you would have freaked if we hit you with it. Oh well.
