A crazy, imported-from-japan driving game thats fun, yet repetitive with absolutely mind blowing graphics.
User Rating: 8.4 | Double S.T.E.A.L. The Second Clash XBOX
Double STEAL: The Second Clash is a sequel to Double STEAL... Better known as the somewhat disastrous Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions. Unfortunately (possibly fortunately) I haven't played the first Double STEAL and the story picks up right where the first one left off... Unfortunately... I have no idea where there is. You play as 2 cute anime-style cops and your boss leads you around the city in your neverending quest to capture "Tagaki." There always the ominous presence of "The Enemy" in their black cars that seem to be everywhere :) Anyway, the major question here is... Is this game worth the $60+ you'll have to pay to import it? Probably not. ~ Mini Review ~ Double STEAL 2 has fairly repetitive gameplay. Its usually some kind of "Collect all the X" or "Destroy all the X" or "Get from point X to point X without crashing." Rampaging through the streets of Chicago is chaotic and fun, and the game packs some challenge but not enough to be frustrating. There are some unique moments in the game (Have you ever had a demolition derby with 3... tanks?) and it has a fairly long campain and a great "free roam" mode with tons of little extra games. The sound gets repetitive but its not too bad. The graphics are abosolutely jaw-dropping. Besides a few little glitches, its sometimes hard to tell it from real life during replays. Its a pretty good game, but for the $60 it costs to import it... you really might as well just pick up a US game of equal or better quality. ~ Gameplay 8/10 ~ Double STEAL 2 is a driving game in which you rampage (literally) around Chicago completing various repetitive tasks. The tasks are divided into missions which are a couple minutes each. The game is a cross between Grand Theft Auto, Midtown Madness, and Driver. You can't exit your car and after each mission, you go back to a mission menu. Each mission usually involves collecting something around the city (Which could be anything from Major League Baseball players, to bombs, to lunch), destroying something (Usually enemy cars or an escaping suspect), or racing somewhere in a given time limit (Like taking medicine to the airport without crashing and breaking it). Considering these are the main 3 types of missions, it gets repetitive pretty fast, but it gives the game some direction to your rampaging around the city. Hitting cars makes them fly away flipping. The physics in the game are absolutely insane. This gets annoying at times. Say you hit a bomb that an enemy dropped, sometimes you'll be flipping over on the hood of your car for like 10 second before you right yourself and the enemy got away. You get boost for hitting things instead of avoiding them (Its like the opposite of Burnout 3) and some cars have special abilities like the ability to drop a bomb. Good for you, only the enemy cars are destructable, you can't blow up. There is damage modelling however. Each mission you complete will sometimes unlock either a new car or a new bonus game in free roam mode (more on the bonus games later). Chicago is a big city and there is a very large area that you get to roam around in, which is fun in itself. What annoys me is that, instead of surrounding the city by water or making moutains or something.. they use invisible walls. Couldn't they just make a circular road around the city? I HATE invisible walls. Fortunately, you're rarely at the edges of the large city so they shouldn't be a large problem. Replays are a cool feature in the game. Whenever you do something peticularly cool or you fall into a body of water, you'll get a replay. The replay's will have a different style to them every time (Sometimes theyll look like an old black and white movie, sometimes theyll have racing blurring effects, sometimes they'll look like caligraphy out of the game Okami) but they ALWAYS look jaw-dropping. Sometimes its very hard to tell a replay from real life, they ARE that amazing. You get a replay at the end of every mission, pass or fail. You can save them to your HDD if you like them. Free roaming mode is my favorite part of the game. You just pick one of your vehicles, and roam around the city causing mayhem. It IS however very different from other free-roam modes in driving games. You can actually do stuff in the city. You'll go off some sick jump and suddenly you'll unlock a new a car because you collected a special item. There are also ~30 bonus games to find in the city. Once you unlock them in mission mode, there will be green circles at various points around the city. You stop in them and a bonus game starts. The bonus games aren't as lame as I thought. At the dirt track, for example, you can join a race in your Speed Buggy. At one of the helipads, you have to follow a helicopter around thats dropping money. You'll get small bonuses for doing well in the bonus games. If you can get over the somewhat repetitive gameplay, theres a good chance you'll enjoy Double STEAL 2. ~ Graphics 9/10 ~ Theres nothing to say here, look at the graphics. They are some of the best on Xbox. During replays it really is hard to tell whether it's real life (sometimes). The framerate remains very constant, no matter how much action is on the screen. There are some nice blurring effect and very nice lighting effects. The sparks are the best sparks i've ever seen in a game. When you hit or scrape up against something, good looking sparks will fly all over the place, illuminating the area. Your headlights turn on at night of course and look great. Everything from the bumps in the road to the highest window on a skyscraper, to the water spewing out of the foutains are very detailed, very realistic, and very well-lit. The replays are lifelike are interesting to watch since every few seconds the camera angle and the style of the replay changes. The only reason this game didn't get a 10/10 is that sometimes objects will go through other objects. If you hit a pedestrian for example (one that didn't dive out of your way) and he goes flying forward, if you run over him again while he's still tumbling forward, he will pass right through your vehicle. The same thing happens with enemy cars and objects. When you hit a lamp-post, you knock it down and go right through it. I don't want to be slowed down by it, but it would be nice if it toppled over my car instead of going right through it. Also the view distance isn't quite as long as I want it to be. Sometimes when you're driving very fast, a car will rush at you from no where. The good thing is, this doesn't matter too much since you can (and should) hit everything. ~ Sound 7/10 ~ Sound is the low point of this game, as it is many games, I don't know why developers don't take the time they do with graphics and gameplay with sound. I guess it's not overly important. Anyway, the engine sounds the cars make are pretty good, the shifting sounds as nice as it would in any racing game, what really bothered me was the voice. Your boss says one line at the beginning and end of every mission. Thats just 2 lines, and they sometimes repeat. The girls say the same things a bunch of times too like "Understood" and "Oops we hit it." The music is so far in the background, you won't even notice that it's there. ~ Value 8/10 ~ The game lasts fairly long, especially if you bother to go back and beat all the missions with a Gold Medal. The free roam mode and all the little extras significantly increase the value of Double STEAL 2. Each Mission is only 2 minutes but you'll probably play a large number of them more than once because of a failure or an uncollected bonus item, and because you'll want to get higher scores. In free roam mode it's fun to either do the mini games or just drive around causing havoc. Of course the world isn't as large as say... Grand Theft Auto and its not as fun to crash over and over as it is to case a major jam in GTA but still, its a different game. Theres a split screen multiplayer mode. I haven't tested it so I can't comment. ~ Other Notes ~ Difficulty: There are difficult missions that you will play over and over but the game isn't frustratingly hard. If you want to get a Gold Medal in each mission however, plan to waste many hours of your life Learning Curve: Its very easy to learn the game. Gas and brake is all that you use and you follow the markers on your radar. Maybe you'll need a half hour to figure out what the heck is going on in the story. Double STEAL 2 is a good driving game with plently of destruction, some cool explosions, awesome graphics... and no US release. I wouldn't recommend paying the full $60 to import this one. There are better games out there and while it executes the mission-based driving game formula rather well... not much sets this one apart from the others besides rediculous-good graphics. Consider it carefully, i'm gonna have to say no just because of the price. 
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