Have you ever noticed how weird Ubisoft is sometimes? The company pumps out war-based games all year and then all of a sudden there'll be this giant blip on the radar that is completely out of its character. Advance Guardian Heroes, Star Wars games, Lumines. None of them fit the publisher's stiff personality and now we can all toss 187 Ride or Die onto the pile. Electing to depict the urban wars that rage within California's ghetto fabulous cities, 187 is nothing more than a glorified drive by simulator. Ah yes, and it's also not a good videogame. Take note of that.

So here's the deal. You're this guy named Buck (aka CJ from GTA:SA) who's hired by this mafia kingpin O.G. Dupree to exact revenge on some guy named Cortez, the only way to do this being drive by shootings. You'll participate in numerous races that take place throughout Cali and the goal is always the same: to kill everyone before they kill you and be the first to cross the finish line. That's not to say that the gameplay isn't varied because the developers managed to put some different spins on the formula, but for the most part you're going to be driving unlicensed vehicles around town and blowing people up at the same time. This is accomplished by accelerating and breaking with the Right and Left triggers respectively and either shooting with X (in front of you)/ B (behind you) or achieving 360 degrees of blasting bliss using the right analog stick.

Much like other vehicular combat games there's power ups and weapons scattered about the courses, and in your travels you'll be able to pick up health, boost, and an assortment of weapons such as machine guns, a shot gun, a land mine, and a bazooka, among other toys. Gameplay is pretty straight forward so you shouldn't have any trouble blowing people up, and blow up they shall! Like in the Burnout games, there's usually a slow motion close up when someone meets their end, and while 187's camera will sometimes obscure the action, for the most part you'll be treated to hysterical sequences where the car will do a flip and the bodies will fly through the wind shield. It's nowhere near as cool as in Vivendi Universal's Flatout, but we here at the GameDaily office always get a good chuckle out of watching some snuffed out opponent meeting his or her demise.

That's the problem with this game. We always get a laugh out of it but we don't always enjoy playing it because repeatedly shooting cars gets old fast. The environments, while varied, are nothing more than closed courses and there's very little to interact with other than exploding barrels and some neatly placed boxes. Plus, the land mine races (where you must use land mines to win) are horrendously tedious and annoying.

Then there's the presentation, which is downright abysmal. I mean come. Who wrote the story for this game? Why is there more cursing in here than in...well...the GameDaily office? What's with the funny rap music? Did Ubisoft actually think this was a good idea? When does Full Auto come out? Why is it bad form to end a sentence with a question? Why?

Because I'm a glutton for punishment part of me actually likes this game but for no more than 20 minutes at a time. I find myself enjoying it like a crappy horror film but not of the B-movie variety. This is clearly grade D meat. Ubisoft attempted to cash in on the urban craze and failed miserably.

Things are kept interesting with multiplayer deathmatching (split screen or Xbox Live) and a co-op mode where player 1 drives while player 2 fires away but it's not enough to make 187 Ride or Die the must have Xbox game of the year, month, week, day, hour, minute, last ten seconds. That is, unless you're in search of a laugh, and if that's the case then by all means.