To paraphrase the movie Airplane, you take your chances getting out of bed in the morning, crossing the street, sticking your face in a fan ... or making a cross-genre game. For every game that succeeds, there are a dozen that fall flat - and if you dare to cross three genres, the likelihood of failure rises exponentially. It is this daring attempt that makes me applaud the developers of Escape from Paradise City, even if I must criticize the mixed success of their efforts.

Escape from Paradise City mixes up role-playing, real-time strategy and a top-down take on the sandbox city-centric thug-whacking genre (i.e. the GTA clone). And unfortunately the distillation isn't kind to any of the constituents; they all lose something of their charm, rather than the game being 'more than the sum of its' parts'. Since the game makes it fairly simple to separate the elements, this is how I will consider them - but first let's look at some of the technical details.

Graphically, Paradise City looks very nice - the characters are detailed and the environments look good up close as well as from a distance. This is an important factor, since you will need to utilize both views on a regular basis, which is typical for a strategy game. The game features a day/night cycle augmented by real-time shadows and lighting effects that add a lively feel to the city as you explore. This isn't on par with top-end genre games like Company of Heroes, but it compares well against most mid-range games in the RPG and RTS genres. The audio is much more of a mixed bag - the narration is done in a deadpan style that seems like an obvious parody and is amusing if you take it as such (it would seem dreadful otherwise), while the remainder of the voice work runs the gamut from solid to awful; you will find yourself wondering if it is supposed to be humorous at times when it obviously shouldn't be funny. Indeed, the rest of the sound work - from the soundtrack to the weapon and other effects - is fairly average; it is the sort of thing that isn't an issue when things are going well in a game, but becomes glaring when there are problems.

Controlling your characters varies according to which camera mode you are using; if you are working in top-down mode then you use the typical 'click move' approach found in the majority of strategy and role-playing games with a top-down perspective. If you are using the 'over the shoulder' mode then things work much more like an action game or third-person role-playing game, using the WASD keys and mouse to control your movement and combat. The third person mode feels clunky though and I preferred to use the top-down controls as much as possible, as they seemed far more suited to the game design; since it has inherent strategy game underpinnings, attempting to play it using a style made for single player games really doesn't work very well.

The 'sandbox city-centric thug-whacking' element is integrated into the story - Agent Kovaks of the NSA has recruited three 'volunteers' to help clean up Paradise City, a place that has been practically abandoned to the thugs and crime bosses that now rule the streets. The three characters - Nick Porter, Angel Vargas and Boris Chekov - are all criminals (or a crooked cop in the case of Boris) who face loads of problems if they don't cooperate. Their job is to infiltrate the local mob organizations, take out crime bosses and seize control or the city, neighborhood by neighborhood.

The RPG elements consist of how you approach your task with each of your 'heroes'. The three characters you control over the course of the game each have a specialty - Nick Porter is a marksman, Angel Vargas is a knife-fighter and Boris Chekov is adept at getting others to take care of things for him. Now put those skills against RPG archetypes and you have a ranged specialist, a warrior and a summoner. As you battle thugs and work to take over a neighborhood, your characters accumulate experience, level up and gain new skills along the way, skills that generally help you do more damage to enemies, which makes gaining experience even easier. There are limits to the amount of experience each character can gain during a given section of the game, but you will end up maxing out every possible skill just by taking over areas. Although the game reminded me somewhat of an action-based version of Night Watch at times, it lacks the excitement and variety of combat found in such a game; every battle boils down to 'click enemies until they are dead', which doesn't make for an exciting RPG.

A big part of any strategy game is gathering resources to build units to send into battle and that is central here, but with a slight difference - your 'resources' are the businesses in neighborhoods you have already taken over, while the units are the thugs you order around to take over more territory. The actual 'strategy' part is pretty thin here - you could simply head to the boss and take him out and thereby capture the neighborhood. However, doing that would lose you considerable experience, so you gather up and assign your thugs, then take them along and start taking out enemy thugs lining the streets. You do this by clicking on them until they die - yes, this is a major click-fest. If you are a completist like me then you will max out your experience fairly quickly - well before you get to the boss. Once you have beaten him down sufficiently he will run off and start turning businesses to your cause. Then you repeat the entire thing with another neighborhood. And another. And so on.

Does this sound like a game that gets pretty repetitive? Well, that's because it does - despite being less than a dozen hours long, working your way through neighborhoods becomes drudgery before long. The problem is that the game presents a very compelling scenario - you have the motivations for your characters, the general course of action and the eventual end-game all lined up early on. And the initial chapters are quite enjoyable - it is when you realize that you have completely tapped the depth of the game within fifteen minutes that you suspect you will be stuck on this treadmill for the rest of the game - and so it comes to pass.

But as I said at the beginning, I still applaud the developers for taking a chance. Escape from Paradise City isn't a bad game - it just fails to live up to its own potential. The combat lacks depth, the environments lack variety, the multiplayer lacks ... players, and the overall experience just feels lacking. With a little variety and some spicing up of the combat system this could have been a really solid effort rather than a mundane treadmill. As it is though, you should give this a miss until it hits the bargain bins, which shouldn't take long.

Reviewed by Michael Anderson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).