Car Jack Streets
by Chris Thomas on Monday 27th Apr 2009

After an agonizing wait its finally here. Tag Games, headed up by two ex DMA veterans that worked on the original Grand Theft Auto, have delivered their own take on the crime genre. Car Jack Streets. A game literally chock full of missions, colourful characters, car chases, fire fights and minute imperfections that better damn well be ironed out in updates.

First things first. Yes, this game is better than Payback. Much better. Where Payback succeeded on a technical level something was always missing from the experience. Character. Soul. Call it what you will but the world of Payback felt sterile, lifeless. You could never put your finger on it but you knew something was missing. Car Jack Streets (or CJS) has character in spades. The city is vivid, lovingly rendered and varied enough to make each extremity of the map feel unique. Head south and hit the suburbs, drive East and uncover the docks and ship yard. The graphics are bold and brash and I love them. As I fire the machine gun it reminds me of the machine gun from Metal Slug, spraying huge rounds in all directions. Nobody survives the machine gun. The cars are all different and unique and loosely based on real vehicles. They handle differently, they come in different colours. This is great. In short - CJS looks and feels like a game made by talented people that love games.

On a technical level the game is a huge achievement, albeit one we must caveat. The aforementioned map is huge, the buildings are all realised in 3D and elements of the environment (crates, bushes, fire hydrants etc) are destructible. The graphics are wonderfully detailed, paving stones are cracked, some have litter on and at night-time car headlights light up the path ahead. The frame rate also holds it’s own, occasionally it will chug a bit when you activate nitro in the fastest cars but mercifully it never becomes unplayable and the vast majority of the time moves along at a fair clip.

Collisions however can be janky and untrustworthy - a remnant in the code from the games former life as a java game. Crashing into oncoming vehicles will often cause both cars to ricochet off each other like bumper cars or very occasionally get slightly stuck on each other. Since the bumper car bounciness can be quite fun we won’t dig much deeper into this but driving purists should be warned. Another collision oddity for your consideration: lamp posts and trees can all be driven through. It seems to be a conscious decision by the designers and one I actually approve of; lets face it, we all like to drive on the pavement, having to negotiate around every lamp post would suck. This just makes mowing people down that little bit more enjoyable.

The controls work. On foot you have an analogous D-pad (although if you prefer being limited to four directions this can be set in the options menu) and contextual buttons; the “jack a car” button appears only when you’re close enough to a vehicle just as the “shoot your gun” button only appears when you have a weapon. When you’re driving a vehicle you have your standard accelerate / decelerate arrows on the right and steering arrows on the left. Just above the accelerate icon is a nitro button that essentially simulates top gear and takes you up to top speed temporarily. Doing so will also make the vehicle harder (read: more fun) to control. TAG Games have gone to some length to simulate momentum and kinetic energy so, for instance, as you tear around a bend at breakneck speed you will end up in a power slide, often resulting in your back end mounting the kerb and taking out a few pedestrians. At first it seems hard to control but you soon acclimatise and after this breaking-in period you will have a hell of a lot of fun with it. Where the controls fall down isn’t actually during the gameplay, it’s the menu navigation; it is goddamn fiddly and unnecessarily so.

When you get a new mission you have to manually set the GPS to point towards the location, doing so requires several button presses, button presses on buttons that are extremely reluctant to recognise my fingers. More often than not I have to tap the screen four or five times to get it to acknowledge my confirmation. Why this is the case is beyond me but fortunately I have it on good authority that this can be fixed in an update. It is a truly baffling oversight really, one that seems like it would take an afternoon to fix. The good news is that it’s not a deal breaker and a fix should be forthcoming.

Until now I haven’t really addressed the set up and premise of the game because I have assumed (perhaps erroneously) that you already have a pretty good idea about what Car Jack Streets is about. In case I am mistaken what you need to know is this. You play Randal Meyers, a chap stupid enough to run up a gambling debt of over a million dollars. Unsurprisingly the mob aren’t too happy and lay down the law - you must deliver $50,000 each week or face their wrath. Sounds fair enough. In a unique twist this story element manifests itself within the game, see the game uses the iPhones internal clock to run in real time. This means that you literally have to pay back $50,000 each week, if you fail you are hunted down and killed and it’s game over. Now on the one hand I love this feature, it’s unique and it adds an incentive to play a little bit each day, not unlike Animal Crossing did in it’s various iterations by plaguing your village with weeds if you left the game for a few weeks. On the other hand, unlike Animal Crossing, crabgrass isn’t the extent of your punishment if you fail to make your payments. In this game you are hunted down by thirty gun toting NPCs and brutally and mercilessly murdered. You must then restart your game from scratch. Ouch. This needs to be addressed in an update. Perhaps a freeplay mode? In any case some of you will love it, some of you will most certainly hate it. I won’t press this any further.

The soundtrack is outstanding. In a true homage to the games origins Car Jack Streets boasts numerous “radio stations” playing some genuinely great tunes from up and coming bands and even features the fake adverts we’ve come to know and love from this genre of game. The amount of audio crammed into this app is borderline staggering. It won’t be long into your time with the game that you will hear a song you like enough to look up the name of the artist online (listen out for Speechless by Smudge).

Buying Car Jack Streets is a bit like buying a Rolls Royce and discovering it doesn’t have cup holders. The game is a technical marvel, jam packed with content, exquisite graphical details and action packed gameplay that you will genuinely adore. There are just a handful of flaws that keep it from being a perfect ten game. The worst offender is the merciless game over for those that fail to make payments. For casual players or those that don’t have a great deal of free time this could be killer. For the rest of us however the chances are that you will make the payments. You’ll make them because being in debt to the mob has never been quite so much fun.

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