VCB: Why City Preview

Sometimes on Steam we see games that infringe on copyright so much that it could almost be a betting game as to how long before it disappears altogether. Then there are games like VCB: Why City, where the aping material is so shockingly bad it isn’t even worth a DMCA claim. Modelling itself as a GTA clone from Russian developers KishMish, don’t expect any praise from me here for I have none to give.

The art is terrible, with a majority created in MS Paint with such minimal effort I am pretty sure I - a writer with no artistic skill whatsoever - could do better. All the buildings are just blocks with the paint texture plastered over, even one of the NPCs is a stick figure on the side of one. The vehicles are also just blocks, artfully styled so they vaguely resemble a car. One of the cars has a penis on the wheel rim, and I think it’s supposed to be funny.

The player models look like they’ve been bought, because most of them actually look like effort was put into their original creation. KishMish, to their credit, realised that this would look very odd so they slapped their own faces on the NPC models instead. The player character is some weird homunculus of a man, so the less said about it the better I think. Clearly, the devs ran out of friends before they ran out of characters to give faces to, because as I previously mentioned one NPC is just a stick figure on a wall and the sole female NPC is as she was bought.

The block-based structure of the game has lead to the roads being significantly raised away from the ground, and they don’t connect properly which can cause the already terrible-to-handle cars to spin out or just get stuck entirely. There’s a corner that is so raised that if you come off it on two wheels the car just gets suck, and you have to reset the car. The whole map is poorly designed, with strange roads that don’t go anywhere and areas that aren’t connected to a proper road. None of this is helped out by the uncontrollable camera, which tries so hard to point in the right direction I think it’s the most involved party in all of this.

The story features a string of unrelated missions, the high point being a mission where you track down and kill a group of negative reviewers for the game’s developers, changing their reviews in the process. This took me straight back to Postal 2 and Running With Scissors’ cameo, except that was probably as tasteful as Postal 2 got and as a videogame reviewer I wasn’t especially comfortable playing this bit. And this was the high point of the story.

The gunplay itself is terrible, and while I easily can blame this on the terrible aiming, which consists of a hip fire or a different hip fire with a different reticle, I’m gonna blame it on the audio. All of the sound effects, from the guns to the vehicles, are made by the developers with their mouths. The engine whine is bad enough, but never in the history of satisfying gunplay has a pistol ever said “pew”. When there are lots of enemies all with pistols, the “pew pew”-ing would probably take someone much older than me straight back to the playgrounds after Star Wars first came out.

Unlike almost all of the games in the GTA series, you can’t get in and out of your cars, instead being treated to loading screens between driving and shooting sections. The loading screens seem to take longer than they do with the only music featured in the game and a GTAV-style character portrait, of course done in MS Paint. I can’t really complain about this - one of my favourite games Driver: San Francisco doesn’t let you get out the car - but the loading screens pad out the game and I’d hope that they weren’t necessary with such a small, simple map.

My final complaint is I’m not sure it’s actually completable. I played a lot of it, and came across several missions that I couldn’t complete. Now, I make no claims to being the greatest player of videogames the world has ever seen, but I’m pretty sure that those missions are designed to be impossible. One of them gives you a car that can’t be controlled, and another tasks you with protecting someone from seemingly endless waves of bad guys with very little ammunition and the aforementioned terrible aiming.

So, to sum up: this is a bad looking, bad sounding, bad to play attempt to cash in on another popular license that I frankly wouldn’t wish on my enemies. It really feels like someone’s first game, and I’d feel bad about being so negative about it except they want people to pay money - albeit a small amount - for the privilege of playing it.