Did you know that the Grand Theft Auto series has a cyberpunk title? It does and it’s called Grand Theft Auto 2! Oh yeah, it features a hellhole of a future city that is over run by gangs, corporations and worse. And your criminal employers want you to do things that could probably get you tried in Geneva.

The game is separated into three areas, representing the Downtown, Residential and Industrial parts of the city. You progress from the first one to the last one by collecting the required amount of money. This isn’t hard to do, because each city area is, besides some neutral ground, carved into the territories of three gangs, whose members patrol the streets. The only “gang” prevalent in all three city areas is the Zaibatsu corporation. Some other, less than lethal, employers include rednecks, psycho scientists and Buddhists (“Ramma ramma THIS, asshole!”). Anyway, every gang offers jobs through ringing payphones (as per GTA 1 , you only get one shot at them).

Higher level jobs are accessed through amassing respect and that is done by either doing missions, or killing members of a rival gang. Just be careful – extremely low respect means that members of gangs will open fire on you. While in Residential it’s just annoying potshots, in Industrial you’ll be seeing more RPG fire than a Blackhawk in Mogadishu.

The missions are much more interesting than the ones in GTA, though the spicy details are still in mission related dialogue texts. Then again, blowing up outhouses with rigged pick-up trucks, drowning gang members in RC taxi cars and collecting people for brainwashing is always fun. And they add to your score multiplier (arrests, once again, take it away). As usual, a colored floating arrow points you toward your illicit objective.

Other than doing missions you can go on “Kill Frenzy” (special missions that give you a gun, a target type and some time to kill the required amount of it), GTA 2 tag hunts, do insane stunts (while the game shouts “Insaaaaaaaane stunt bonus!”). Crusher cranes offer an interesting twist on the whole “steal a car, sell it” activity: they crush the car and recycle it into a weapon or a bonus you can pick up (my favorite is the “electrofingers” pick up which, well, electrocutes civvies who get too close). Or, in the first two areas, you can find hidden tanks and just kill your way to the required amount of money, because no one can stop you.

But in Industrial you will be stopped. You see, GTA still has police and their interest in you is measured in “heat”, bobbing cop heads at the top of the screen. The more heads there are, the more interested the cops are in catching you. In Downtown this means that they’ll send SWAT teams after you (they have the coolest vans ever, then again, this game is pretty proficient in van portrayal). The next step, in residential, is sending in FBI units in armored cars, armed with shotguns and silenced SMGs. And if that doesn’t convince you to stop your criminal activities, your shenanigans in Industrial might draw the attention of the NATIONAL GUARD. Every person in the street is replaced by an SMG totting trooper, APC and machinegun armed (thankfully, NPCs can’t use it) jeeps patrol the streets…and there are TANK ROADBLOCKS. Yeah…

Beside the cops and the gangs, there are two more prevalent nuisances on the streets. One of them I call jocks: red jackets with white sleeves mark the guys who try to mug you (or the civvies) in the streets. They usually meet their end with your bullet in their back. The other type of scum are the green t-shit (probably) wearing carjackers. They mostly strike civilian cars, but your car might be stolen too.

Gun selection has been improved too. Fists still can’t kill anyone. But shotguns, silenced SMGs, grenades, Molotovs and electroguns (it’s like Force Lightning for those weak in the Force) do, in addition to the usual weapons already seen in GTA. As an added bonus, you can pick them off the people you kill! But the fun doesn’t end here: along with rigging the car, you can now add oil slicks, mines and mounted machineguns. Oil slicks are especially fun when placed on a road near water or high falls. I guess you can respray the car too, but that’s boring.

While combat still suffers from mouse-less control schemes, now even an unarmored player can take more than five shots…unless you’re torched by a flamethrower. Which one gang will carry, once you tick them off. Then again, the game did implement a saving scheme, though you have to visit a church building in the center of the Chernobyl Zone… I mean, the center of the city area and a save costs 50K a pop, overwriting any previous progress.

Completing areas will unlock bonus missions. They happen in small maps and are, really, extended “Kill Frenzies”. Multiplayer is quite fun, although you don’t get to ride around the single player city locations. Still, the maps serve their purpose of showing your friends that you, indeed, cannot drive.

The game is still played from the top-down perspective, yet the implementation of 3D elements make it look much better than GTA 1. The attention to detail is awesome, vehicle design – drawing influence from vintage cars – is even better. The sound part is decent, with radios gradually evolving (what with crazed DJs and on-air ads for SMGs) into the crazy companions that we all love and know.

GTA 2 is stunning and atmospheric and fun. If only Rockstart could recreate it, instead of doing San Andreas on GTA IV engine (now known as GTA V)...