"Worst Game on the PS2."

I can't believe I had high expectation for this game. I thought all the crappy shooters had ended for the season (as there were quite a number of them) and now developers have learned what it takes to make make a good one. Guess I was wrong, terribly wrong as 25 to Life is the epitome of all that is crap in the genre. 25 to Life is appalling in every single way and I was completely awe struck when I found out that Gamespot had given it a score of over 5. I wonder if they were playing the same game as I was because anything above 3 is simply idiotic.
Graphics: 1

Atrocious. The graphics are one of the worst on the PS2, if not THE worst. Aliasing is all over the place with characters looking as bad as you can imagine. Textures are limited, bland and unclear. Facial expressions are the worst I've ever seen in my entire life with the mouth "going inside" the face at points and sometimes the teeth stick out of their cheeks when they're talking and hair goes through the neck and head with some weird physics engine. It's just... UGH. It's awful seeing all these problems and technical disasters at this time and age.

Not only that, but 25 to Life has its fare share of shuttering and framerate drops which completely took me by surprise because the graphics were absolutely horrendous. Without exaggerating, over 70% of all the cuts cenes have shuttering. Try it and find out for yourself! The designs are boring, the levels, enemies, characters you play as... they're all designed very poorly and are all generic and bland. The animations are off as well with everyone moving like stuffed toys (um, couldn't think of something better, sorry) and don't even react to getting loaded with 25 machine gun rounds. Simply AWFUL GRAPHICS!!!

Story: 0000000000000000/10

Ahhh, my favorite thing about 25 to Life. The story is so horribly cliched, generic, plagiarized, predictable and full of stereotypes and random crap that it makes stories like Fahrenheit and FFTA seem original and epic! You're a black gangster working for a Mexican boss and are returning to your nice family of lively child and lovely wife. After having a "happy" moment with your son, your wife gets in a discussion with you and tells you that you need to "get out of the game". At the end you're convinced and go to your boss to tell him the news.

The Mexican guy says that you "shouldn't listen to the ****ing *****" but in the end he gets convinced as well and promises that he'll let you go after one "final job". Yeah right. This "final job" goes horribly wrong (duh!) and now you'll be battling your way through cops and gangsters while trying to save your wife and kid who have been kidnapped. On the way you'll play as a "detective" and another gangster throughout the game's highly predictable story that you've heard millions of billions of times before.

The horrible voice acting, graphical hiccups, crap directing and major over usage of curse words make the cutscenes and story even worse than before, driving it to the side of being so bad it's good. I swear, and this really happened, that I kept laughing my ass off throughout the opening sequence and as soon as the game began I paused it, fell to the floor laughing and then caught my breath before continuing. And that's just the intro!

Sound: 0/10

The sound in general in 25 to Life is so freakingly horrible that you'll be wishing that you were born without ears. You'll be praying to god at night that he make you deaf. You'll be trying to rip out your ears off in order to "unhear" the sounds in 25 to Life but don't worry, you can't unhear stuff, even without ears. You see that's what you get for not listening to your old buddy red soul and not turning off the sound while playing this "game".

Voice acting is so bad it's actually scary. Seriously! It's as if the voice actors were pulling some kind of prank or were betting who would do a worse job in doing these voices. Seriously, I am not joking, the voice acting is that bad, it is crap as crap voices can get. Again, earning the sound in the game the so-bad-it's-good status.

As for the music, I was hoping it would be the only good thing in the game as I somewhat am a rap fan. But again, to my surprise, they couldn't even do that right and all of the songs in the game suck. Which is really bad since the songs are playing during gameplay in every single mission. So imagine this: You're going through a level with crappy music, bad gameplay, horrible graphics and no realism or fun. This truly is one of the worst games in existence.

Gameplay: 1/10

The gameplay is oddly similar to the likes of 50 Cent: Bulletproof and The Punisher. It's a third person shooter with slight stealth thrown in to make it diverse. Unfortunately, stealth is completely useless as the enemies will more often than not know that you're hiding behind that wall (even if they didn't see you). That's in contrast to when sometimes you're shooting at someone and then hide behind a wall, only to find out the when you did that, the enemy completely forgot about you.

Speaking of inconsistency and horrible AI, how is it that sometime enemies have godly aiming skills and have 100% accuracy with a machine gun at a 100 meters away and then at a later level they shoot at you like a blind drunken sailor? It doesn't make freakin' sense! But then again, nothing in this game does. People take a magazine or two before they go down and before that, bullets don't affect them one bit. The main character himself can take two Molotov cocktails to the face and still be only slightly fazed. In fact it's kind of funny going all Rambo on everyone while in the middle of a huge fire.

About the gameplay itself, well you go in an extremely linear fashion from one "area" to the "next area" while shooting everyone in the way. That's it. There are some secondary objectives like getting a bunch of headshots or killing a number of enemies but those are just thrown in and make it look like more of arcade game than (what is supposedly) a serious plot-driven game. Sometimes you'll be accompanied by some allies that are supposed to help you out but these brain-dead monkeys tend to give you more trouble than help. For example, let's say you're standing between your "allies" and enemies, they will without hesitation fill your back with 800 bullets with no regards to the fact that you're one of them. Hilarious! Again, the gameplay in the game, along with the annoying music can either be regarded as annoying-as-hell or so-bad-it's-good.

Multiplayer: 1/10

The online multiplayer could've been the highlight of the game since the crap AI would no longer be a problem (since you're playing against human players and all) but it fails as well. I don't know how, but the server is flooded with cheaters that hack into everything and steal and kill everyone. There's this HUGE battle currently between admins and cheaters. One that is quite fun to watch.

Final:1/10
Definitely rent this as it's a very good laugh and so you can tell your grandchildren 30 years from now the story of how played 25 to Life when you were younger. If you're a collector then buy it so you could sell it in 30 years for 2000$. 25 to Life is a game that's so bad it's actually good. Even better than Big Rigs. 'nuff said.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 09/11/06