Quarantine

There are some respectable driving/action games on the market like Twisted Metal and Burnout; then there are the games trying to make a buck by pushing a gimmick. I don't really know where Quarantine would reside; I can't find any discernable target audience for this steaming load. It makes attempts at the open-ended driving experience of games like Grand Theft Auto, the destructive mayhem of Twisted Metal, and the courier-style gameplay of Crazy Taxi. It fails miserably in every one of these genres!

The opening FMV scene shows a guy with a ponytail who apparently had it all; a wife, a little girl, a house in the suburbs. And then something happened. They don't really explain "what" happened, but the next scene shows our intrepid hero living in an alley, then driving a taxi. It would appear Imagineer wrote the opening scene while they were shooting it...or possibly after. Anyway, your role in this game is to drive aggressively and pick up fares. The driving aspect is abysmal; you have virtually NO control of your vehicle. To brake you must push Down on the control pad, but even after doing so the car usually only stops when you collide with an oncoming building. The guns mounted on your taxi do not appear to inflict any damage on enemy vehicles. When your taxi is hit, the necessary thud sound and visual rocking is apparent, but you never see this happen to the enemies!

To make matters worse, the courier part of the game is nearly impossible to play. If you should miraculously stop close enough to a pedestrian to let them get in, you are "treated" to some ridiculous banter about where they need to go, and how they will pay you extra if you "kill a few people on the way". It's done in such a corny way that you would just as soon not bother. The "free roaming" environment is a complete nightmare to navigate, as every damn building looks the same as the last, and the map feature is no help at all. The only way out of this one is to smash your car into a wall repeatedly until you are granted the luxury of suicide. Only then will you be free.

Perhaps if this team had stuck to one kind of game and worked to make it good, this could have been something. As it is, this game shouldn't have ever been sold in stores. If you paid money for this game, you were screwed; but I'm sure you realized that after you tried playing it!