Addictive, but expensive – Crime City HD Review

This game can be a lot of fun, and social since they added the syndicates. It is unfortunate that in this, and all gree games I've played (Kingdom Age, Modern War), that the constant redesign to squeeze more money out of players has become very insulting and tedious. Often changes are ill-considered and cause significant login, connection and crashing problems. When you report issues you are likely to get a "Thanks for the Information" response, regardless of whether or not a game defect caused you to lose money. Add-on quests and syndicate activities are often poorly designed, either matching groups for competition that have widely disparate strength, or, as happened recently in Modern War, making even the easiest level of a challenge so difficult that, despite having all 46 players on our team involved, we were unable to accomplish even the most basic task of a quest with45 tasks. This occurs more regularly than is fun, Gree fashioning activities that cater to the small minority of players throwing huge amounts of real money into the game. Lastly, my pet peeve: Gree changed how we name our avatars and the new system causes many players to miss the screen and wind up assigned the name "Alex" by the game. Coincident with this change in naming avatars, Gree instituted a 50 gold fee for name changes. Gold is not earned in the game, it must be purchased for real money (in fairness, tapjoy does offer the minimal chance to earn small amounts of gold). At the regular price, 50 gold cost $4.99. Yes, that's right. A $5 fee to rename your avatar after Gree's reconfigured process names it automatically for you. That makes me crazy! I'm also not very fond of the poor placement of many, many screens, or the suspicious ability of the game to buffer hits only when they result in the automatic expenditure of gold (which will not be returned, regardless if, like me, the amount was in excess of 400 gold (or about $30).
Review by Omasbest on Crime City HD.