Everything seemed so right.  A video game based on classic cult film that in itself had a great video game plotline:  make it from the center of New York City back to your home base on Coney island alive, while every gang in town is hunting you.  The gangs are numerous and overly stylized, almost cartoonish.  There are mime gangs, girl gangs, skater gangs, even baseball fan gangs (the infamous Baseball Furies, bedecked in vintage Yankee uniforms and war paint).  Each gang has nine members, a perfectly manageable number for gameplay variety.  The fights are ultra-violent and in the vein of the Dirty Dozen, in that you never know who will survive.    

As they say in Hollywood, “It writes itself!”

For anyone unfamiliar with the film by Walter Hill, it takes place in a near-future (well, in 1978), New York City where creative, oddball gangs war with each other over turf.  When a prophetic gang leader named Cyrus invites delegates from each gang to a meeting (a sort-of mini United Nations), to discuss a consolidation of their power to take over the city, a new age of peace seems imminent.  All that is shattered when one particularly anarchic punk sneaks in a revolver and shoots Cyrus at the peak of his classic, “Can you dig it!” motivational speech.  The same punk then pins the killing on the Warriors and the hunt is on.  Now, they must make it from the meeting to the Coney Island train line, dodging vengeful gangs and overzealous cops every step of the way.

 
When I saw ads for this game, it was all I could do to control my bodily fluids from expunging themselves out of excitement.  They boasted the actual voices of the movie actors (including Xanadu’s Michael Beck reprising his role of the leader of the racially diverse Warriors, Swan), lotsa fighting, and the Rockstar label.  Best of all, I could play with my girlfriend in co-op play.  “Of course,” I thought.  “Why hadn’t anyone thought of this sooner.”

 
And yet, much like that night for the fictional Warriors of the movie, something went horribly awry.

 
I have been playing this game on and off now for about a week and I just can’t bring myself to finish it.  It’s hard to explain what is causing this malaise of mine.  The graphics are well done, recreating the bleak hopelessness of  the movie’s NYC.  The soundtrack is straight out of the movie and adjusts to the action for the game.  When a fight occurs between your gang members and anyone else you come across, the music swells in tempo and volume, dying down again when the victim/adversary has been properly smacked down. 

 
The gameplay, too, is really very creative.  You can pick up almost anything around you and use it as a weapon.  When fighting, certain moves (a brick to the face or a bottle over the head), slow down to accentuate the drama.  One of the most amusing aspects of the game is how to acquire money.  You can grab random people on the street and mug them for their cash, through a method where you move your joystick in a circular fashion to cause vibrations.  You can use your joystick again to rob cars, rotating it to unscrew the virtual stereo systems out of their dashboards.  Certain stores can be smashed into and cleaned of all their valuable items to add to your coffers.

 
Using your gains, you can purchase Flash, a drug that ingeniously restores some health, or spray paint to write the Warriors tag over another gang’s nom de guerre.  This again involves deft skill with a joystick, tracing over a line.  Stray off the line and you waste a lot of paint.

 
Feeling that the movie’s plotline was not enough, Rockstar filled it out by starting everything months before the meeting.  Unlocking flashback missions allows you to see how the Warriors became a gang (a spin-off from another gang apparently), and enlisted its current members.  Pretty cool, huh?  The continuity geek in me loves it when characters are fleshed out through various backstories.  Hell, I read the Silmarillion all the way through, kids.

 
However, this may have been what killed the game for me.  There are just so many missions in those previous months that by the time the meeting finally comes around, I couldn’t care anymore.  All those nifty gameplay ideas that kept my nipples fully erect for the first third of the game had become torturous endeavors, instead.  After you’ve mugged your 100^th innocent victim, it becomes a chore.  I’m pretty sure the cracking point for mugging came when I robbed an entire nightclub full of people and felt a complete lack of fulfillment. 

 
Oh, sure, I left with hundreds of dollars in my avatar’s pocket.  But at the beginning of the next mission, I’m back at $0.  Only to mug, steal, or loot a hundred more times.  Sigh.

 
Each level is overly helpful, too.  Most of your checkpoints and goals are handily presented to you as if you were a mentally challenged embryonic lifeform with no cognitive capabilities.  Go here, do this.  Sometimes, getting from point B to point C requires some stealth.  Too bad the clunky camera control makes it difficult to do this with any grace. 

 
This camera difficulty rears its uncontrollable head most annoyingly in the two-player cooperative play.  Get this:  when you are traveling and fighting alongside your partner, you share the screen, but once you move more than five feet away from each other the resulting splitscreen sent us into a flat spin of confusion.  Who was who, where were we facing, what, who, huh??  Our heads were on the verge of exploding when it recombined into one screen again once we drifted next to each other. 

 
We tried to overcome this issue by pursuing different subplots on each mission, so we were always in split screen.  But every so often, we would unknowingly run into the other player and the screens would combine, scaring the be-jebus out of us.  Eventually, we just gave up, rendering the excitement over co-op play moot.

 
With that small hope for joy taken out of the equation, the game quickly devolved into a unending blur of mugging, gang rumbles, and tagging.  It was a long hard slog in my mind.  I’m given my orders to go somewhere and beat the piss out of another gang, watch a long cut scene of my boys riding the train…again…and fight every gang member and cop for the next half hour.  Every time I do, it gives me a countdown to the meeting.  I pray at that moment that it will skip a few months ahead and save me the pain.

 
I made one goal:  to get to the movie part of the game.  At last, that goal was accomplished and after a nearly word for word CGI retelling of the first ten minutes of the film, I couldn’t go on any longer and shelved this game.  It now resides next to similarly boring and disappointing games like Mercenaries (the drab countryside of North Korea does not an exciting game make).  It’s repetitive listless atmosphere stays with me though, usually in my nightmares when I sleep.

 
So sad, that a game full of such promise and innovation was ruined by a case of overindulgence.  It’s as if the creators just couldn’t say no to any idea that came their way, until at least they had a game that felt endless to play.  I once saw the craptacular remake of ‘The Grinch Who Stole Christmas’ which also suffered from backstory fatigue.  Once the original material ended and the Seuss material started, I was instantly entertained.  My hopes is that once I revisit this game, the story and gameplay more directly lifted from the movie will make up for the drudgery of the imitators. 

 
I’m not making any promises, though.