Gangs of London

London: such a beautiful town. I know, let's trash the place! Trash it proper!

Gangs of London isn’t a standalone game so much as it is a seemingly endless series of rapid fire mini-games. It takes place in a huge open map and revolves around gang warfare missions that extend your influence over the city. The good news for fans of Grand Theft Auto is that all of them are themed around death, destruction and chaos, as well as drugs, women and money.

Unlike GTA though, the game doesn’t take place in a map, it takes place from a menu screen. The city might resemble a sandbox because of its sheer size, but the missions have been broken apart so that you can select them from the menu screen -- a politically divided map of London which you get to watch become slowly covered with your gang’s colour.

In the main story you choose your crew from one of five racially profiled gangs and roll with them. In this case, roll with them means fighting a turf war with the four remaining gangs in an attempt to take over London. You start out on a section of your own turf and proceed to push into the boarders around you, taking out other gangs slowly, mission by mission.

Each mission is divided into what seems like 5 minute bursts of repetitive, formulaic fun which are sandwiched by intro and outro comics which let you know why you have to kill person X, Y, and/or Z, but give no sense of any overarching plot. The more you complete, the more sections of the map you’ll be able to play the mini-games in.

The control system is below average, and at times poorly thought out. You’ll find yourself pulling somebody out of a car and garrotting them accidentally, instead of getting into the car that their insurance will cover anyway. When you’re racing a clock it will make your life difficult.

When you get bored of the generic tasks in story mode, you are left with some interesting, but average mini-games. One is a Risk-based territory game with an emphasis on tactics, free-roaming mode (which lets you appreciate the map design), tourist mode (which forces you to appreciate the map design) or speeding, blowing things up or killing people against a goal, as well as a few other pub-based mini-games like pool and darts.

It’s all very formulaic, tried and true fun, delivered in short sharp bursts. It makes it a great game to zone into and out of without much effort, but this is also its Achilles heel – it’s disjointed. It gets older much quicker than GTA, but there’s still quite a bit of replay value, due to its bursts-of-fun design. If you are expecting depth, look elsewhere.