Gangster: West Coast Hustle
The first thing that comes to everyone’s mind when they see this game is GTA for the iPhone. Lets just clear this up now, this is not GTA, this is West Coast Hustle. With that out of the way lets get down to the nitty gritty. The game kicks off with a fantastic intro that makes your iPhone look like a HD Gaming platform and immediately gives you a buzz.
Being the hardcore gamer that I am, I jumped right in and went with the “I’ll pick it up as I go along attitude”. When the game beginning you’ve got an on-screen analogue stick that controls movement, and all I can really say about that is it does what it’s there to do. On the opposite side to the analogue you get a “cross hair” type button which controls the characters combat moves. After a while of running around and playing you forget that your actually playing on an iPhone and not some other handheld gaming platform.
For those of you who like the idea of stealing cars and driving off at high speeds, well never fear because WCH allows you to do just that. When you approach a vehicle you get another icon pop up on screen. By pressing this you can enter and exit vehicles. Now this is where it gets a bit tricky. When your in a vehicle you get two on screen pedals, one for breaking and one for acceleration, pretty easy to understand. But the default driving settings means if you tilt the iPhone to the right, you will steer the car to the right and vice-versa if you tilt it to the left. I found the motion steering hard to use so I entered the options to see what else I can do. Upon entering the game options you get three steering options.
- Motion: involves tilting the iPhone left/right
- Wheel: brings an on-screen wheel
- Stick: an on screen stick that you slide left/right
After testing out all the settings I preference stuck with the “Stick” option as it offered a more controlled and realistic driving experience. To add to an already impressive game, all the vehicles come fully loaded with a stereo which you can turn on/off and switch station by sliding your finger over the stereo. And if this wasn’t beyond the boundaries, you can even use music from your iPod’s playlists.
Now it wouldn’t be a gangster game without guns and WCH has it’s fair share of guns and ammunition that can be purchased from the Gun Shop. There’s not much more to say about that.
Graphically WCH really shows of the potential of the iPhone as a gaming platform. Yes there are jagged edges but it was not so long ago that I was playing console games with jagged edges so I can look past this.
Overall I would say this is a very good effort from Gameloft.
