Ah, Manhattan Chase, we meet again. I remember stumbling upon this game while stalking the internet in the summer of 2010 (I feel old), and was semi-fascinated; a Grand Theft Auto game, but you play as a girl? Well, that's interesting. Then I played the game, and it was absolutely awful. However, this wasn't a garden-variety bad game, this game was a true kusoge. I laughed every minute or so at this game attempting to be a video game but failing every step of the game. Whether it was the horrendous gameplay, the chalkboard-sound inducing audio mixing, or the Big Rigs-tier handling, this game gave me plenty of laughs, but I'm a bit astonished that this game hasn't gotten the attention it deserves.
Well, let's go back to the past, play this shitty game that certainly sucks ass, and see how much it really failed, and whether it deserves to be called "The Worst Game of All Time".
Context: Ah, the 2000s. What an exciting time for gaming. The early 2000s brought us four great consoles: PlayStation 2, XBOX, GameCube, and Dreamcast. Consoles were starting to become more than just gaming devices, and video games were becoming more life-like. Additionally, PCs were becoming stronger, and could play better games. In hindsight, this was another golden generation in gaming, and many games in this era will be remembered as classics.
One game series will define the early 2000s like no other: Grand Theft Auto. Controversial, yet revolutionary. For the time, Grand Theft Auto brought us life-like, dynamic sandbox environments which reacted to the player's actions, full of NPCs going on with their day and a story and side-quests. The original Grand Theft Auto III did so many things that have now become staples of gaming.
Of course, a success will bring copycats, and one trend of the 2000s were so-called Grand Theft Auto "clones", though I don't really see these games as "clones", and the trend wasn't such a bad thing. The polarizing Driver 3, True Crime: Streets of LA, the Spiderman games, Simpsons: Hit and Run, and even Spongebob: Battle for Bikini Bottom all came from this trend, and later games such as Saint's Row and the Watch Dogs series have innovated the sandbox game genre themselves.
And, of course, you have your run-of-the-mill shovelware. Manhattan Chase is one of those abysmal shovelware games which came in to capitalize on a trend. Manhattan Chase was developed by the Dutch Team6 Studios, a notorious shovelware developer, and their most infamous moment would come in 2011, with the release of FlatOut 3: Chaos and Destruction, the lowest-rated game on Steam. The game originally came out in 2005, and to my understanding, the game only received a retail release in Europe, and its distribution was handled by various smaller budget publishing firms depending on the country. In the Americas, the game (I believe) was only released digitally on various digital purchase-and-download sites (the days before Steam), which is how I got ahold of this game in the first place. However, years pass by, and this game is now long out-of-print (probably since 2012), and the original digital distributors of this game are either shut down, or have discontinued this product, so obtaining this game via authorized means is difficult, and even the original game developer no longer lists the game on its website, effectively making this game abandonware.
As you can imagine, though, this game was simply meant to capitalize on a fad. It was meant to trick uninformed consumers into thinking they were buying something as good as Grand Theft Auto or even True Crime. This reminds me a bit of the just as infamous Crime Life: Street Wars, which we will review one day. It was also a budget title, meaning you could have bought this for cheap; I can imagine some kid wanting to get Grand Theft Auto, only for their parents to disappoint him/her with Manhattan Chase.
Story: The game's story takes place in Manhattan, New York (duh) which I'm sure has not been done a million times over already. You get to choose as two characters: Angel, a blonde female NYPD police officer, or Jasmine, a mafia boss who wants to take over the city, so a good-and-evil sort of thing. Not bad.
I only ever played the Angel arc of the story, and it gets worse the more you play it. You have to stop the infamous and evil Jasmine from taking over the city, and apparently, Jasmine is plotting some kind of terrorist attack (yeah, the developers weren't particularly sensitive here). The game progresses, you bust up a bunch of these different criminal fronts such as prostitution and drug dealing, kill low level crooks before you eventually get to Jasmine. Yep, that's some Hollywood blockbuster stuff right there, it's not particularly new or innovative, forgettable really.
There are no cutscenes, rather you have this comic book style that the game presents cutscenes; while this has been done before well (the under-appreciated Max Payne, which I think this game was also copying from), in this game it comes across as lazy. The comic book scenes are just screenshots from the game, and they look like they've been edited with a computer program. I would have forgiven this, if the scenes felt original, but they aren't, so this is rather lazy.
The story becomes hilarious, however; the developers were obviously not very familiar with American culture aside from the TV shows and such, and their obliviousness unintentionally makes the story funny. For example, in one of the scenes, the state of New York is referred to as a country. The game constantly makes grammatical mistakes and spelling errors, meaning the developers didn't properly translate the game into English, and the other translations are probably as shoddy.
In addition to the language/culture mistakes, the game's environment makes the story much more ridiculous. The female protagonists' personalities mostly boil down to "hot babes with guns" shtick, so there is no depth like say, Lara Croft, Kim Possible, the Powerpuff Girls, or any other good female protagonist/lead. Angel's motivation is mostly lead by her generic-sounding patriotic duty to protect the citizens of New York, while Jasmine's motivation is "to just do evil shit, cause the world treated me like shit, yo". The cars are all fast sports cars, there are explosions everywhere because after 9/11 in this universe, the US government decided to arm all police cars with missile launchers. The guns are big, and even the lowest ranking thug in this game has as big of a gun as the military.
The story gets an overall score of 3/10. The game's premise is convoluted enough where you want to keep playing and see how bad the game's story gets. The over-the-top factor, mixed in with the developer's mishaps make this game feel like it was meant as parody.
Graphics: Oh dear god, the graphics.
This game came out in 2005, yet it looks awful, and instead looks like it came out in 1997. The character models are unappealing to look at, and look like they were ripped out of a PlayStation game. None of the character models look particularly... normal, and have this very shiny look to them. Hell, the character models don't even look like they have real eyes, making them creepy to look at.
The lighting and color palette in this game is particularly terrible. The game constantly looks dark, and while I like the dark-aesthetic used in games, it's done poorly in this game. Compare this game to GTA III and you'll see what I mean. This is one of those games where the color palette has to be dark brown, orange-ish type of colors which make the game visually unappealing. It feels so happenstance, like they came up with it and boom, done, the game is gonna look like that.
There are other graphics-related issues which probably says how through the QA check was with this game. The texture mapping is poor, so many areas in this game will look awkwardly detailed and are rendered badly. The game's skybox is static, meaning that the sky will literally stay the same, no matter how much time passes. The game's models look extremely blocky; I understand that this was a budget PC game, but there are other budget titles that came out at this time (even free online games) which looked as good, or better.
The particle effects (such as explosions, fires, and so on) look extremely bland. They look hastily made, almost like they were just drawn in PhotoShop, without any extra effort to make them look realistic or particularly inspiring. Another issue I noticed was that there were neon signs which appeared to be just neon text, rather than proper neon signs. The game is meant to take on a "dark gritty New York" feel, yet this one issue with neon signs makes the game look worse.
The graphics get a 1/10. This game uses the same engine as BloodRayne 2, yet looks so much worse. The developers were absolutely lazy with the graphics, and couldn't be bothered to make this game look better past an alpha state. It's obvious this game was unfinished. There were no budget issues here; if you're able to get a decent game engine, make use of it, and don't make the game look like it was meant to be played on N64.
Sound: The game features music from the Theatre of Tragedy, and I have to say, the game's soundtrack is pretty good. It... fits well with the kind of game they were going for. Perhaps this was where much of the budget was blown when it came to audio, however, because even a good soundtrack gets ruined by the game's awful audio-mixing.
The game's various sound effects, such as driving, explosions, and shooting are either extremely loud, almost silent, or are completely off-sync with the rest of the game. They don't even sound particularly high quality either, and the game's music gets muddled behind the absolute mess of the audio mixing. Again, it's obvious that the game's developers were lazy; they just mixed together the sound effects, called it a day, and never bothered properly syncing the audio. Hell, I don't think these people knew how to use audacity. It causes a migraine on the player.
It's not like these sound effects are particularly interesting, anyway. They just sound like generic stock sound effects taken from every action movie ever.
The sound gets a 2/10. Only the game's soundtrack saves it from being a 1, but even that is ruined by the poor audio mixing. It's irritating!
Gameplay: Now we get to the real meat and bones - the gameplay.
Manhattan Chase is your typical action-adventure video game; you have driving sequences, shooting sequences, and so on. Surprisingly, this doesn't feel too much like GTA, as there isn't much in terms of free roam (though I do believe the game has free roam features). Manhattan Chase, unfortunately, is one of those games where the game's difficulty is caused by the developer's incompetence, rather than the game being challenging.
For example, the driving. The driving in this game is AWFUL. Each vehicle goes from 1 to 400 MPH in about a minute, meaning that each vehicle is extremely difficult to control. The handling is just as terrible, so you'll be struggling to make the most basic corner turns without crashing your vehicle and taking damage. I swear, the game's driving physics are about as good as Big Rigs; what's worse as that you'll constantly have enemies firing projectiles at you, meaning that you can't afford to take any sort of damage, or else your vehicle will lose speed and become more fragile. Given that this game (fittingly) has so many chase scenes), this makes the game extremely difficult. Your vehicle is going to get destroyed either by the poor handling, or the enemies firing overpowered weapons.
In this respect, you have very little in terms of offense/defense; your car can run out of ammo, and you'll need to constantly look for pick-up boosts that either restore your car's health, or give you more ammo or a new weapon. However, because the game physics are so slippery, even firing a weapon at these annoying enemy vehicles can unintentionally cause damage to your own car. It's absolutely ridiculous that so much was done wrong that it makes the game that much more challenging. Even the driving games on the Sega Genesis version of Action 52 handled with competence. The game's sequences involve a lot of driving, so be prepared to die a lot.
The run-and-gun gameplay, thankfully, is not as bad. However, the game's movements are extremely janky, meaning that it is difficult to maneuver your character. It's also difficult to maneuver your gun, as well, so aiming at enemies becomes tricky. You will take a lot of damage from your enemies while you scramble for cover, struggling to fire off any shots back. Additionally, it's so easy to take damage yourself, so again, you will die a lot. What is also unfair is that the enemies are able to fire so many bullets at such a quick rate, meaning the game is quite cheap too.
Frankly, the majority of the levels in this game are pretty bland. Nothing that we haven't seen before. The game's enemies look pretty generic too.
Overall, a 1/10. It boggles the mind how a video game in 2005 that went retail could have so many gameplay issues. Even the LJN games on the NES had functional and competent gameplay. What's worse is that plenty of these problems could have been easily fixed, once again meaning that this game was lazily made. What a shame.
Final Rating: 1/10
There is just so much wrong with Manhattan Chase. It is obvious that this was a low-effort cash-grab made by a low-quality developer that couldn't care less about the final product. There are a few half-baked ideas to be found in this mess of a game, but otherwise, the game is a massive trainwreck. All of the standards that were established by 2005 are broken in this game. What's worse is that this game is more complete than Big Rigs, meaning that this pile of shit can be called "a game".
But the thing is, this game is so hilariously broken and bad, that it makes it special. Of all the GTA clones that I have played, Manhattan Chase is easily the worst one I have played. Whether it's the ridiculous lost-in-translation story, the incompetent gameplay, or the outdated visuals, this game gets everything wrong, which makes it special. This isn't one of those generic Wii shovelware titles, or some predictably bad movie license tie-in. This is a well-crafted turd, much like say, Action 52, Ride to Hell: Retribution, or Virtual Hydlide. It's why I remember this game so much; yes, it's awful, but it's funny. This game is terrible, but it's a terrible game done right.
Is it the worst game of all time? Well, this game should definitely be in the discussion for that title. This isn't as much of a glitchy shitfest like Action 52, but this game is a giant pile of poo like Bubsy 3D. I would say, at least, this game is on the tier of Ride to Hell: Retribution. Should you play this game? **** yeah. It's awful, and it's a good game to laugh at. You'll find some hilarity in how ludicrous this lump of crap is.