Outlaw Chopper (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 1.0 stars Terrible
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 2.4 (1.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Alex Navarro
• Reviewed on: 07/26/2006
• Released on: 07/11/2006
• Originally published on GameSpot: Outlaw Chopper (PC) Review

Some people might argue that the Grand Theft Auto series, for all the attention it gets, wouldn't amount to much if you stripped out the games' top-notch storylines, consistently excellent voice acting, unique sense of style, clever mission designs, enjoyable driving mechanics, engaging combat, and sheer environmental scope. For those who believe this, your messiah has arrived in the form of Outlaw Chopper. This budget-priced PC action game strips out all of the above from the GTA formula, leaving only the most bare, skeletal mechanics required to make for a functional game. And it is functional--but as far as entertainment goes, Outlaw Chopper is completely bereft of anything of the sort.

Outlaw Chopper tells the story of a rogue biker on the hunt for revenge. As said biker, you've just been released from prison after a five-year stint. You were set up by another biker named Blade, who sold you out to the cops, then proceeded to take over your operation while you were wasting away in the clink. Now alone and with no rep to speak of, your job is to work your way through the crime-filled streets of Rockland, doing assorted missions for various criminal types in order to get back what was yours and extract revenge. If this sounds like the basic setup for just about every GTA-esque game from the last few years, that's because it is, but with bikers. Frankly, the story never really comes across as anything but an excuse to get you out on the streets of Rockland, riding around aimlessly and occasionally killing people.

Potentially this wouldn't be so bad, except that the gameplay is the unfortunate combination of achingly dull and badly realized. One key detail that must be made clear from the get-go is that you never, ever get off your bike in Outlaw Chopper. All the missions are built in such a way that every objective merely involves you riding around from place to place. When combat does occasionally rear its ugly head, you're forced to awkwardly shoot or swing your weapon while trying to steer the world's most unwieldy motorcycle at the same time. It would help if you had halfway-decent aiming controls to work with, but sadly, you do not. So instead, you're forced to try and fumble your way through every instance of combat without scrambling to pull up your start menu and frantically click on the uninstall button. This is, of course, a losing battle.

The bike itself is an unholy beast, difficult to steer, even more difficult to stop, and constantly threatening to send you flying after bumping into a seemingly innocuous object at a relatively low speed, or blow up after a few well-placed gunshots by various denizens of the city who are shooting at you for no explained reason. The physics of the bike just feel broken. Trying to slow the thing down is practically an exercise in futility early on, because you literally have to stop braking several blocks before your intended destination, or you're going to blow right past the thing. Likewise, trying to slow down to take sharp turns rarely ever works correctly. Unless you come to a near-grinding halt at every single turn, odds are you'll overshoot the angle and go crashing into a nearby building. Suffice it to say, this gets very old very quickly. It also doesn't help matters that you can only control the bike using a keyboard-and-mouse setup. The game purports to support gamepads, but every gamepad we used popped up a "this button is already bound to another action" error, even when said buttons are assigned to nothing.

As the game goes on, you can improve the feel of the bike a bit by buying new parts for the thing. In fact, right away you should buy the most expensive brakes in the game, because without them, you're hosed. Even with them, you still feel like you have to give way too much lead time in order to come to a total stop, but at least it isn't quite as horrendous as it is with the default parts. Beyond this, you can improve your bike's armor, acceleration, and the like, but these improvements aren't especially tangible when driving around, so it's not hard to feel like you're riding on a mobile money pit.

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