RapTranslations.com - 25 to Life - Xbox Video Game Review

25 to Life Video Game Review

Some video games are meant to be groundbreaking. Some are meant to push limits. And some are simply meant to be entertaining. Eidos Interactive’s new multi-platform third-person shooter 25 to Life may not be applicable to the former, but certainly more to the latter.

In this Max Payne-esque game, you progress through the storyline as one of three characters. You’ll play behind either “Freeze,” a local drug dealer, “Detective Lester Williams,” a cop, or as “Shaun Calderon,” a gang leader and Freeze’s best friend. The level design is fairly linear and you won’t see many alternatives paths to your final destination. The levels sometimes resemble Tony Hawk levels in terms of generic blandness and graphic style. 25 to Life’s graphics are rather average when compared to other shooters currently available for the Xbox gaming system.

The sound and music soundtrack is easily one of the best features of 25 to Life. Tupac, DMX, Juvenile, Geto Boys, Yukmouth, and Public Enemy are all familiar artists who lent their tracks to the game. The game’s method of playing these songs is rather awkward because there are randomly scattered boom boxes throughout the level playing the music and when you arrive at one you can push a button to skip the track. A better implementation would be to incorporate this feature in the pause menu so you have more control over the music playing.

There does seem to be a few glitches scattered throughout the game as well. One significant one we encountered was the difficulty of taking hostages through doorways which seemed nearly impossible. Doors also randomly caused other problems such as opening the wrong way or sometimes not opening at all when they in actuality should have. Some clipping issues were observed throughout the game when it came to enemies as well.

Online play was surprisingly entertaining. The levels are often ones encountered in the single player campaign. Several different online modes as well as the ability to fully customize your character’s look made the Xbox Live enabled portion of the game quite enjoyable.

Overall 25 to Life is a moderately entertaining game that can be enjoyed if you look past its initial flaws such as poor storyline and other various glitches. The controls can be difficult to get used to and character hit boxes often seem too small on the console version. Don’t be surprised if aiming is one of the biggest issues to overcome while playing the game. It does seem at times that too much effort was put into licensing some of the music and not enough time was spent on fine-tuning the game’s details. While you can’t expect 25 to Life to be especially riveting in any particular way, you can expect it to keep you occupied for several hours and perhaps it’s best saved for a rainy day... Or whenever you get tired of getting modded and standbyed on Halo 2.

RapTranslations Rating: 6/10

This review referred to the Xbox version of 25 to Life.