Escape from Paradise City Review

Let's invent a new game category: the MOL game: more or less. Escape from Paradise City is a great MOL game. Are the graphics and design effective? More or less. Are the RPG and RTS elements blended successfully? More or less. Is the game, ultimately, worth the player's time? MOL. You get the idea.

CDV's Escape from Paradise City cribs a bit from the Diablo series, cops a few plays from Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown, and borrows heavily from RPG/RTS hybrids like Spellforce and Warcraft 3. Because of the setting--a modern, gritty, corrupt city--it doesn't feel quite as derivative as it sounds. We all appreciate a break from the swords and sorcery milieu, even if ultimately the setting lacks variety and becomes monotonous not very far into the game.

Primarily an RPG, the player controls one of three main characters, each with different strengths: an ex-con, a street thug, and an ex-FBI agent, all recruited (i.e. blackmailed) by a secret government agency to clean up the mean streets of Paradise City. Is this premise a little hackneyed? MOL, and it isn't helped but some really amateurish writing. Games like Escape from Paradise City really suffer in comparison to the triple A titles where real, professional writers script the dialogue and set the scene with effective prose.

So, in true RPG fashion, you earn money and experience and develop your character's skills, abilities, weapons, and talents--some of them coming out of sci-fi land--and in RTS fashion, assign gangers and henchmen to attack, patrol or guard locations and bits of territory. Unlike some RPGs, though, character upgrades are unlocked at the end of missions, which does provide some incentive for continued play. This system also means that some poor choices in character development make some levels quite frustrating.


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