Reviewed April 28, 1999
Kingpin: Life of Crime  has the graphics and sound effects to be a winning PC game, but it shoots itself in the foot with extremely complex levels and repetitive characters. Others have given good reviews to this enhanced Quake II engine-based game from Interplay, but I fail to see why. The graphics are ilies using cash that you steal from your victims. The thing that makes this game different, though, is some of the dirtiest language ever put in a retail game. It would easily be rated 'R' if it were a movie, just for all the four-letter words spewing from nearly everyone's mouths. Ironically, this is also the part that turned me off, not because I care about cussing animated characters, but because it just got so old after only about two hours of gameplay. This was due mostly to the fact that there were a limited set of sound files to play the profanities from, so every foe sounded the same as the last, and each sounded like a broken record if not immediately shot to death. There weren't that many enemies to take out, but the stages were incredibly complex, making me traverse endlessly in circles while thinking I was covering new ground. Usually, when I was about to stumble upon a group of bad guys, there would be a bimbo standing guard, warning me not to go anywhere near her pals. This was annoying, since there were only about three variations of bimbos, and not many more sound clips for them to repeat.

This game has some of the best graphics and sound that I have experienced, but the tiring, pathetic gameplay ruins any chance of me recommending it. If you want to try it out anyway, Interplay has a demo, but it is a monstrous 105MB download. The installation of the demo is a breeze, as is the deletion, which I did only hours after first playing it. I don't even consider it to be worth the trouble to download it, let alone the price for the retail version. I give Kingpin: Life of Crime only two of five stars.

This review was originally published at the PHS Cardinals site.