Urban Chaos: Riot Response
October 21st, 2007 by Jeff
I picked up Urban Chaos: Riot Response brand new for $4.99 in one of those little video game bargain bins at Best Buy a couple months ago. It came out back in 2006, as the original Xbox platform was winding down and the Xbox 360 was taking the spotlight. I just finished the main campaign mode of UC today and had a lot of fun with it.
The game is a first-person shooter set in a large city in the near future. A hyper-violent gang is running wild and the city has become a war zone. You play as a member of a special anti-gang squad that is authorized to use extraordinary force.
There are a few interesting play mechanics that set UC apart from the plethora of FPS games on the Xbox. Most prominently is the riot shield: a transparent, bullet-proof shield that you can raise by pressing the L shoulder button. Using the shield is crucial to success in UC. With the shield raised you can withstand almost all enemy gunfire without taking damage. As the shield is used, it becomes riddled with bulletholes, cracks, blood spatter, etc so that the more you rely on the shield, the worse your visibility becomes. You can’t fire a gun while the shield is raised, but you can thrust it forward and knock an enemy off-balance, giving you a chance to lower the shield and get some shots off.
Another prominent mechanic is the use of supporting NPCs. Sort of like a squad-based game, I suppose, but a little different because your squadmates in UC are firemen, paramedics, engineers, etc who you’ll need for various specific tasks throughout the game. There are often a couple other police officers running around with you through the missions as well. Thankfully almost all of these NPCs are smart enough to not get themselves killed and, in the case of the police officers, they actually do a good job of helping out in a firefight.
The graphics in UC are perfectly acceptable, in my opinion, for a last-gen shooter. The urban environments look good, although they do sort of blend together from level to level. The enemies all look very similar; they’re all dudes in hockey masks, except for a few gang leaders who look a little different. I would have liked some more visual variety to the enemies; it would have been cool if each of the 10 or so gang leaders was more of an individualized character.
There’s a lot to do in the game, with multiple goals in each of the 10 or so main levels, as well as 6 timed “emergency” levels that you can unlock by apprehending gang leaders alive. Overall I thought UC was very fun and most definitely worth the bargain price I paid.
Editor’s Note: screenshots ganked from other sites via Google image search, credit goes to whichever sites they were 