25 to life Rip For PC

December 2, 2005 - While most of our looks, and hence coverage, on 25 to Life thus far has be focused around the game's online features, we recently received a 2-level demo build of the game here at the IGN offices, allowing us to see what two full areas of the game will play like all by your lonesome. Just make sure you've got a 40 at your side, or a glass of milk, depending on how old you are.

The two levels in the demo allow us to play a mission on both sides of the law, one as Detective Lester Williams, and the other as Freeze, a drug dealer who's attempting to leave the crime life but must pull a couple last jobs to get out, so cops and thugs alike are after him. Both levels are seemingly extracted from random segments of the game, so we've had to rely on the mission briefing in order to fill us in and give us reason for killing countless cops, thugs, civilians, potted plants and whatever the hell was around.

The first mission is noted as 5 - Club, which assumingly makes it the fifth mission in the game. We're smart like that. The primary objective here is to find a man named Shaun Calderon, who will show up as a playable character later in the storyline. You start the mission in front of the club's bouncer, who means you no harm, but we went ahead and popped a cap in his ass just for the hell of it.

Just down a stairwell is the dance floor, with the bar to the right. The bartender picks up a gat and lets a few bullets fly, as do a few thugs on the dance floor. Unloading a couple clips into these chumps results in them crying to their mamas, or actually saying something like "I can't believe I'm going to die" while they lay bleeding on the floor. Whatever, they shot first. Like Han Solo did. For reals.

After clearing the floor, it's obvious that Shaun has fled to the rooftops, so your mission objective changes to following him up there. On the roof, you need to navigate the essential wooden crates while you gun down the bad guys, who all of a sudden have a tendency to throw pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails your way. Fortunately, their aim with these things is pretty poor so they end up burning themselves alive, spouting out such crybaby phrases as, "I'm on fire!" Hell yeah you are. Burn, mofo, burn.

After clearing off the rooftops, which can take a few minutes, you head down a ladder and meet up with some other pigs, err... cops, on the street. A few gang members are causing a bit of a raucous in the area, but a pipe bomb or two will leave them with nothing but their teeth to indentify the bodies. Into the subway we went, which is where the mission ended.

Freeze's demo level is called 11 - Mall, so it's not chronologically connected to the first level. Basically what's happening here is that Freeze needs to get to a DrJays.com clothing store to ditch his digs to lose the cops, but unfortunately the mall isn't filled with shoppers. Unfortunately for the cops that are there, and those that try and bust a few cheap shots through the ceiling windows of the joint, they're all about to die via a bullet to the head.

This level, like the club mission, is very straightforward. We just plowed through cop after cop, working our way through the inside and back corridors of the mall in order to find DrJays.com. The store, not the website. We could have just typed that in. Once you get there and Freeze quickly outfits himself with new digs, Detective Mendoza shows up and a boss battle ensues. The battle would be reasonably easy if it were just her, but SWAT team members continuously spawn and fire off stray shots into your general area, forcing you to run about while you find health pick-ups until Mendoza is finished off.

Each of the two missions has a set of side objectives that you can aim for while completing the missions, which seem like they'll help to unlock content in the full game. The club mission pits you to keep your accuracy above 25%, bust four drug dealers and nail four headshots. Those make sense, but the "Complete level without dying" secondary objective for the mall level seems pretty obvious.

The bits we were able to play of this reasonably short demo makes the game seem like a straightforward slaughterhouse shooter, where the end goal is quite obvious and the only thing in your way is a large group of enemies. 25 to Life is obviously betting that its gunfights and overall style will carry it to success. It's hard to judge the style for the most part so far since we've only seen unconnected snippets, but fans of third-person action games will know what's in store for them here. There's a lot of killing to be done, so we'll just have to wait and see if the full game will turn out to be a compelling murder simulator.

Minimum System Requirements