Having been a hardcore gamer for nearly three decades and reviewed Android games for the last three years, I’m used to seeing clones upon clones of the same games over and over. The repetition doesn’t dampen my enthusiasm for gaming in general, but I find as I get older I have less and less tolerance for poorly made games.
Enter Miami Crime Games, a mobile game developer based in India with studios in Spain and Beijing, whose stable of Android games are easily the most blatant franchise rip-offs I’ve yet to come across in the Google Play Store.
The particular game I naively volunteered to review is aptly named What the Hell, which turned out to be quite fitting, as I found myself repeating the phrase nearly every minute of the 6 hours I forced myself to play this psuedo game, that is before I finally gathered enough screenshots to illustrate how terrible of a “game” WTH really is
What the Hell Were They Thinking?
My first reaction after loading the game up was to start documenting the typos. Any time I see a typo within the first 30-seconds of starting, I’m compelled to document it. Being a professional writer, I’m well aware of how easily a typo can slip through the cracks, but the sheer number of syntax errors found in What the Hell is simply astounding.
I’d cut What the Hell some slack for the egregious grammatical and syntax errors since English is clearly not the developer’s first language, if the script’s persistent errors weren’t so laughably indicative of the rest of this complete mess of a game.
in the very first text that pops up, we learn the protagonist in this blatant GTA rip-off is named San Andreas…seriously. Nobody seems to have explained to these people that GTA San Andreas was already a play on words, a point that’s obviously distorted by the time it reaches the brains of whatever geniuses came up with this crapfest.
It doesn’t take long before you realize this is going to be the tone for the rest of the game. After moving past my initial thoughts of “what the hell,” I tapped the screen to move into the game only to find there’s no story in the game itself. The only way you have even the first clue of what’s happening is by reading the story synopsis that’s bolded on the Play Store description. Here it is verbatim:
Story:
Do you sympathize? There’s no way you can empathize. You can’t possibly relate to the mother of a six year old child who was just tragically struck with a stray bullet before her own eyes. You can’t understand what it feels like having just cashed your first paycheck, only to get robbed on your way to the store for a gallon of milk. You get only one word at this time. “What The Hell”.
You’re then presented with the glossiest black man you’ll ever see in your life and an icon on the screen leading you to the specific car you’re supposed to steal. If you’ve never played GTA, I have no idea how you’d know to steal the car because nothing on screen tells you to do so, and it’s not immediately clear.
Why you’re stealing the car is a mystery, as is the timer that appears once you do. I immediately hit the gas and start speeding down the highway to explore what I’m told is an open sandbox environment based on the real city of Miami.
What the Hell Kinda City Is This?!
In a normal sandbox game, you can explore wherever you want, because the landscape is built out to resemble an actual city. Instead of a real city, you’re traversing the incoherent mind of a psychopath during an incomplete Inception-altered vision.
For example, in a typical city, there are buildings with walkways and roads leading to these buildings. In WTH, buildings are placed with no rhyme or reason, and nearly every road or sidewalk leads to glitch dead-ends, where you can’t help but notice everything is fully randomized. What the Hell isn’t a sandbox adventure, it’s like crawling through a dirty litter box that’s been stewing in cat piss for over a month.
The complete lack of attention to detail makes the city impossible to navigate, and you’ll often find yourself having to backtrack through a maze of nonsensical obstacles. No worries though, because your car takes no damage whatsoever from hitting anything. In fact, you can just drive through trees like they’re not even there.
By the third mission, the broken and practically unresponsive fighting mechanics are so bad, that I decided it’s easier just to run over my targets. That’s when I slammed my car at 120 mph into a man who didn’t even budge – in fact, he ran at me with such force that it pushed the car backwards, despite me having my finger firmly pressed on the gas pedal.
What the Hell Is the Point?!?
How bad WTH is doesn’t much matter, because half the time you’re not even playing. Every five minutes (or upon completing a mission), you’re interrupted by a lengthy video commercial for more games, many of which are from Miami Crime Games.
A television network will at least give you seven minutes of content before cramming an advertisement down your throat, but What the Hell was obviously created for the sole purpose of making money. Miami Crime Games knows everything about the freemium business model and monetizing a free video game and nothing about how to actually design and develop a video game.
I was also treated to one unknown rap song on constant repeat by who I can only assume is a friend of the developers. It wasn’t long before I was screaming “What the Hell?!?!” out loud, finding myself getting increasingly frustrated.
If you eventually earn enough money, you can buy guns so you don’t have to fight with your fists, but the aiming mechanics are even worse than the shoddy fight mechanics. You eventually reach a point where the game is simply unplayable, so I have no idea how it ends.
What the Hell Am I Doing?!?!
What the Hell seems designed for no other purpose than to lure you into playing other Miami Crime games, all of which are mockbusters not even attempting to hide the blatant IP theft from popular franchises (especially Rockstar Games) like Resident Zombies, Furious Fast Racing, and Santa Theft Auto.
After several days of grinding through What the Hell, desperately searching for something nice to say about it, I finally gave up and uninstalled this abysmal “game” from my Shield tablet. There’s a huge funwall that makes WTH impossible to overcome. I can’t even recommend this game to my worst enemy – everyone deserves to be treated with dignity.
Is it Hardcore?
Not even close.
What the Hell is aptly titled. By the time you finish playing it, you’ll be wondering what the hell you just wasted your time on.
