Crime Inc.–the Legal Way to Commit Crimes on your Android

Written Android App Review

Crime Inc.

Crime Inc. has a small but decent walk-through tutorial which gets you set to play the game by showing you all the ropes. The set up is familiar to anyone who has ever played this style of game on a social networking site. There are missions to complete, called ‘Jobs’ which pay out experience, money and random treasures (in this case, weapons). In order to maintain a constant flow of money, you will have to purchase and upgrade buildings, which pay you a set amount every hour. However, certain equipment, such as vehicles, will cost you money every hour. Therefore, it is vital to make sure you have enough coming in to pay what is going out and still make a profit.

1. The screen refresh is somewhat slow, which makes it take longer to complete jobs or attack players. It is not horrifically slow, but slow enough to be a nuisance.
2. The game randomly returns to the main boot screen, essentially reloading the game. No progress is lost, but it means you have to make your way back to where you were to continue. Again, just a wee bit irritating, but not terrible.
3. The amount of money that gets exchanges seems ridiculously high. For instance, you start the game with $250,000. Everything you do pays in multiples of thousands but item cost is relatively low in comparison. I might get $18,000 for killing another player, but a car only costs $12,000.

Design

Surprisingly, this game uses great graphics and has a nice, easy to understand layout. The home screen has a correlating picture to each area of the game. There is also a nice menu bar along the bottom for easily jumping between areas. My only complaint about this bar is it does not include every area. For instance, to get to ‘Family’, I have to go to the home screen first, then click on ‘Family’. All of the most commonly used functions are on this bar, though, so it is convenient enough.

Each page has a nice layout and provides all your stats at a glance at the top of the screen. Your ‘crew’ (a.k.a. hitpoints), money, level and respect points are visible at all times. The dark theme is highly appropriate considering the nature of the game and all text is easy to read. As such, I award five stars for design.

Value

The game is free, and there are several others like it made by the same company. So if Crime Inc. isn’t your cup of tea and you prefer something more in the fantasy genre, there’s a game for that too. There are six such games in all, all with a different theme. This raises the overall value not just of this game, but for the developers as well. Since this appears to be their specialty, you can rest assured that their games will be high quality and are likely to have bugs taken care of fairly quickly. Crime Inc. is their newest addition and it was just released May 13th. I’m sure they will soon have the bugs I mentioned ironed out, but for now, I will award four stars for value. If they were to fix the bugs, I would award five stars!