Review by:Tony Mitera

When CrimeCraft originally came out it was an interesting if not flawed game, combining a persistent online backend with traditional team-based gameplay. The release of Bleedout has done well to iron out some of the more major issues with the game and has added a significant amount of PvE content.

Plot doesn’t exactly make a large appearance in the game, other than explaining that the proceedings take place in a post-apocalyptic future where gangs of criminals roam the bleak urban landscapes of our fallen civilization. Your character escaped these dangers and made it to Sunrise City, a somewhat fortified metropolis. However, while you may have escaped the thugs on the outside the same cannot be said for the danger, and before long you find yourself participating in gang warfare for money and reputation.

While in one of various zones of Sunrise City (also collectively known as the “lobby”) you are free from harm and able to visit the various vendors and objects of interest such as ATMs to store your items, mailboxes to send mail, and the entrance to your gang’s hideout assuming one has been purchased. Make no mistake, though the zones of the city are relatively large and complex they don’t have a lot of content to them, and mainly serve as the hub from which you run around in to buy and sell, train up new skills, craft items, or simply chat with the other players.

The meat of the game play is centered on instanced combat maps, structured around either players fighting bots or other groups of players. PvE play pits any players that join the map against respawning bots and tasks them with either protecting an area from the bot’s assault or scouring the map to kill groups of them and picking up the crates of random items that they are protecting. Fighting the largely stationary bots is ultimately a matter of simply gunning them down before they do the same to you, and lacks much in the way of needing any tactics to do so.

Fighting against players is much more varied and is where the majority of your play time will be spent. PvP instances have many different modes, such as Robbery which has each team defending their safe while trying to get to and steal money from the enemy team’s safe and Turf War which is essentially capture and hold in which each team fights a tug of war over five points distributed in a loose line across the map. PvP matches are fast paced and unpredictable, both due to how the level designs are very non-linear and due to how nimble yet vulnerable players can be. You cannot jump in the game but instead can sprint and roll around to quickly get you into cover or dodge enemy fire at the expense of your stamina. It is important to do so, as many weapons in the game are easily capable of killing you in a handful of bullets if not just one well-placed shot.