iPhone App Review: Big Time Gangsta

★★★★☆
Riding dirty, blastin fools and taking over the city block by block all in your pocket. And it's FREE. Alriggghhttttt...

Okay this is one good game if you're interested in RTS-ish, Final Fantasy-ish (huh?), gun-tapping or just feeling gangsta. BTG allows you to control your own gang and take over the city block by block. There's not much back story except for the intro rap song which explains how you just got out of prison and will have to take back the city and every last dime (honestly, the rap's kinda lame).

But luckily the song's just a minor 1 minute con compared to the whole content. Let's check it out:

You can control up to 6 gang members to a fight for new turfs. You'll meet some uniformly dressed gangs like the Colombians, the Guatamalans, some old biker-gang bangers and more. This is where you tap tap tap on screen to select whom your gangster should blast. Reloading sucks though.

This here is your crib or HQ. This is where it all starts and you can do missions from here. It may not look much but it was pretty hard to get that SUV, the two bouncers and the Jacuzzi on my crib's porch.

If you have the papers you can upgrade your crib into bigger pads like Da Kastle which may worth 1 hour of MTV Cribs review. You need dollars and credits to buy stuff. Dollars are collected from story missions and apartments you've taken over. However like all games credits are IAP but they can buy a lot of fancy stuff and guns. Did I mentioned guns?

Apart from pimping your puny bungalow, you can also purchase guns and other equipment for your gang members with even bigger guns with spoofed names. I though AKA GRILLA was a cool AK-47 spoof, until I saw the GOLD HAMMER... Gold-plated AKs are so gangsta!

This here is the snapshot of apartments you need to take over. The more you take over, the more money you get, the better equipped your gangsters are and the more turfs you can fight for. Repeat.

The map is kinda huge for a game this scale. For now (version 1.2.2) there are two of areas. Apart from story missions, taking over turfs and pimping your stuff, you can participate in an all out gangs vs gang gauntlet in the Arena.

Overall this is a good game. Beats a typical gangster game where you are required to buy random stuff to do a mission and do that mission a few times until you level up. Then use your imagination to visualize all those icons and numbers fighting among themselves. Highly recommended but can still be improved. Like, WHY IS THERE A GANGSTA WHO LOOKS LIKE AN ASIAN HERMAPHRODITE?

DOWNLOAD NOW  from the app store...