I was all set to write up a review of 25 to Life for the Rocky this week, but decided to hold off for the retail build to do the review. The debug copy I received had some graphic glitches, which I'm told are fixed in the final, and didn't let me test out online play. What it did let me do was play through the single player part of the game.

I ended up beating the single-player mode in about four hours spread out over a couple of days. While I think the plot was a little thrown together and the cutscenes are very spotty, the actual gameplay was tons of fun.

25 to Life plays a lot like Socom light. It's a third-person shooter with a lot of the same features, but not quite the same graphics wallop of Sony's famously popular military shooter. The control set up lets you duck, lean, jump, interact with objects, zoom in, switch weapons on the fly and go into a melee mode.

As a shooter, the game succeeds on most levels. Sure, it doesn't reinvent the genre, but it does serve up a quality shooter set in a unique backdrop with a fun set of characters and rules to play with.

In essence, this game is a cops and robbers shooter. You play through the single player mode as three characters: a cop and two gang bangers. The storyline is mostly a vehicle to place you in a relatively eclectic mix of different levels. I loved most of the level design. From running through prisons and malls to shooting it out with federales in a Mexican barrio, you can tell that a lot of thought went into designing the maps. It's nice to play a shooter that serves up settings other than your typical military set.

As I mentioned earlier, 25 to Life doesn't really reinvent the wheel, but it does offer up a couple of relatively new concepts. The two most interesting are your ability to tase and arrest thugs when you play a cop or take hostages and use them as human shields as a thug. Sure this has been done before, but the cops and robbers storyline makes it particularly fitting in this game.

25 to Life got a lot of attention last year when Jackie boy decided to take a stance against the game because you can kill cops in it. While this is a ridiculous line to draw in the sand (So is Jack saying it's OK to kill Marines or pilots or aliens ? OK, maybe aliens are OK.)

While I enjoyed the gameplay, I was at times taken aback by the visceral nature of the killings. The graphics are some of the goriest I've seen. In particular, head shots are quite atrocious, leaving you with a headless corpse spewing gouts of blood out of a ragged neck.

But what really helps this game deliver a gut punch are the sound effects, specifically the things people say as they die. The library of taunts, pleas, cries for help and shouts is quite extensive. I found one, in particular, very disturbing. Late in the game, as I was gunning down cops in a mall they started saying things like: "Oh god, forgive me of my sins. Have mercy on me." Or "Oh Jesus, I don't want to die this way."

I know this is immensely hypocritical of me, but it's one thing to blow ragged holes in 50 to 60 cops in a single level, but quite another to hear them sobbing out their last few seconds in prayer. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't offended, just a little disturbed. And maybe that was the idea. Maybe shooting someone to death shouldn't always be a clean experience.

Overall, I'd say the single-player mode of the game was well worth the time I invested in beating it. But it was the gameplay and sometimes viciously hard levels that kept me plugging away, not the plot. And beating the game, which is always a reward unto itself, resulted in a trite ending to the already-weak plot.

In the end, I decided to hold off on doing my full review of the game until I take a look at the multiplayer aspects, because this looks like a title that was really meant to be enjoyed online. The single player mode, while quite enjoyable, offered just a taste of what I hope is an equally robust online experience. I'm told that you can still arrest people in the multiplayer game, something that I'm really looking forward to. I'm also interested to see how customizable the characters are in the multiplayer game.

I played online in the beta test months ago, and that was the one aspect they were still working to develop.

I'll make sure to write a review of the online bits of the game in the next day or two, or once I get a copy.

For now, though, I'd say this game looks like it's worth buying if you're a fan of shooters.

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