James Earl Cash was scum. A vicious criminal. After a life of crime he was given the ultimate sentence and put to death by lethal injection. The public believed that this vile man got what was coming to him at the hands of the justice system. Their perception of reality was far from the truth. In Carcer City, a run-down wasteland of immorality and crime, everyone is corrupted. The people who supposedly gave Cash the injection were actually paid to give him a large sedative. He was dead to the general public, but some sick opportunist had other plans for him. Our protagonist wakes up in a cramped room, groggy from the after effects of the injection, and a gravelly voice is speaking to him over the intercom, telling him without a hint of remorse that he must now take part in his ‘games’, stalking and killing murderous gang members whose duty it is to hunt down and kill him. Cash’s actions are to be recorded by CCTV and sold as snuff films, so if he wants to play ball he must dispatch of these scumbags in the most violent and brutal way possible with whatever he can find.

This one was banned over here in the UK and due to the reason for this I felt like a bit of a bastard going out of my way to find and purchase a copy but hey-ho, age certificates are there for a reason. Being of the certified age I didn’t see why I shouldn’t be able to go out and find myself a copy of what I now consider to be one of the sickest, most brutal, and one of the best games the PS2 has to offer. I would like to point out here that there probably should be some kind of mental stability test that gamers should take before playing this game as I would definitely not recommend it for anybody who is just a little too impressionable. This glorious gorefest was created by Rockstar, the guys who brought you the Grand Theft Auto franchise in case you didn’t know, so you can expect something totally obscene, vulgar, incredibly offensive and, if you’re smart enough to see that it’s just a bit of fun, some of the funniest dark humour you can get in a game.

As indicated in the plot summary, you play James Earl Cash, you go around murdering patrolling gang members whose duty it is to take you down when they see you and mutter some hilarious dark- humoured dialogue when they don’t. That’s just about it for the gameplay, for the most part you will find yourself hitting a wall to lure them over, hiding in the shadows where they won’t see you unless they have seen you out of the shadows just before (I know, it sounds broken, but bear with me on this) then you walk slowly up behind them, making sure they neither see nor hear you, and dispatch of them with whatever you have to hand, holding down the ‘kill’ button longer for a more brutal attack. There are three forms of attack which work differently with different weapons, these are; quick kill, violent kill, and brutal kill. If you get through a level in as little time as possible with as many brutal kills as possible, you get a higher grade and can unlock bonus content. There’s a good little snuff star!

Now most people may be put off by a game which not only encourages you to kill but rewards you for being as ruthless as possible, but I like this game. I think the main thing is the storyline. It seems pretty limited when you first go into it but the plot actually thickens and Mr. Starkweather (ha ha, I see what you did there Rockstar), the funny fucker talking to you through your earpiece telling you to kill people, develops as a character as you make your progress through an increasing body count of thick headed gang members. Another thing I liked was the innovation of the gangs and weapons you can use. Despite the repetition in some of the murders (you will find yourself doing the knock-on-wall-hide-in-shadows routine quite a lot), the weapons each do their own thing which you will see through a creepy broken CCTV screen each time you kill someone, and the gangs are really quite intriguing.

As for the gangs, the first bunch of douchebags you come across are an over-the-top parody of a bog-standard street gang. College jackets, baseball bats and stockings over their heads (oh Rockstar you do amuse me). The second gang are a white supremacist group, some sporting Jason Voorhees-style hockey masks and others just typical skinheads, whose dialogue I found to be the most hilarious in the game as they frequently mistake Cash for someone of an ‘inferior’ race just before you crack them over the head with a baseball bat, splatter their brains all over a wall and run away twice as fast as these fat fuckers can move at top speed. The gangs progress through to the completely absurd, culminating in Starkweather’s elite forces, a black operatives unit much like in Half-Life who can hunt you down no problem and are armed with some pretty unfair weapons as you start their introductory chapter with little more than a crowbar.

My personal favourite (and yours too if and when you play it) were the Smileys; taking refuge in an abandoned mental asylum, sporting yellow smiley face masks, some covered in self-mutilation scars, some wearing women’s blouses and brandishing a meat cleaver, all of whom have the most insane and disjointed dialogue in the game. Even though dispatching these guys is more or less the same as what you will have been doing up until meeting them, the insanity of this gang really keeps you on edge and there’s something doubly scary about being alone against cleaver-and-shotgun-wielding psychopaths in an abandoned mental asylum.

As for the weapons there’s a pretty wide variety of useful and intriguing items. You’ve got your disposable weapons which you use once only such as your glass shards used for stabbing jugulars, plastic bags for asphyxiation (oh yes!), and cheese wire for decapitation. You’ve got your lures in case you need to bypass some guards, make a distraction or whatever such as your house bricks, empty whisky bottles and (oh shit yes!) severed heads! Then you’ve got your light weapons that can also be used to open doorways and gates and stuff such as a pair of plyers, a knife, crowbar, claw hammer, sickle, hand-axe etc. Then you’ve got your heavy weapons slot; baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, machete, shotgun, chainsaw… Oh yeah there’s some gunplay too, which brings me to one of the game’s downsides. The way Cash moves and the way the camera rotation works is all well and good for third person survival horror where you’re supposed to creep around and dispatch enemies from behind. It does not work so well with gunplay. The camera rotation in particular bent me over a fair few times when some big guy behind me opened fire on my arse with a dirty great sawn-off and I couldn’t turn round fast enough and aim in time to deliver any damage before he happily blew my face off. Also there’s a rather large emphasis on gunplay in some segments of the game which I put down to the repetitiveness of the hunting element.

As well as the repetitiveness of the hunting and stalking (and this may sound petty unless you’ve played the game) the machete and hand axe do exactly the same attacks as each other. I know it feels good to have a guy on his knees screaming and gurgling through his neck wound before you deliver an unsubtle three further blows to decapitate him but I don’t see why the hand axe couldn’t have been used in a different way. Aside from this the guns can’t even perform executions so if all you have is a colt and a shotgun and there’s some meaty young guard patrolling ahead of you just begging to have his bollocks invaded by a sickle, too bad! You will use your shotgun and you will be less satisfied!

But overall the gameplay is pretty good and as repetitive as the executions can get the weapons and their uses are pretty innovative and the storyline was intriguing enough to make me want to keep playing until the end- something I have now done much ore than once. Also, despite everything negative I have said the whole game is totally worth it for the showdown in a decaying attic of a mansion with an obese man wearing a pig’s head as a mask, covered in blood and dirt and armed with a huge friggin’ chainsaw! By far the best boss fight out of any game I can think of! So if you’re a fan of survival horror (and even if you’re not- I can assure you I’m normally not) or if you just want an immersive and fun way to blow off steam or feel as though you are taking part in an incredibly violent horror movie, give this game a whirl. 10/10 for story, 9/10 for innovation, 7.5/10 for gameplay. (8.8)