The new face of crime

By Mikel Reparaz
published

Sega unleashes fresh Yakuza screens

The US games market has been getting a little top-heavy with urban-crime games lately, but urban-crime games set in another country? Now you've got our attention.

In Yakuza, a free-roaming gangster epic from Sega, players will stomp around Tokyo's red-light districts as Kiryu Kazuma, a former yakuza soldier returning to a life of crime after 10 years in the slammer. The actual gameplay seems to revolve around close-up fighting (so far, we haven't seen a single gun or a carjacking). Yakuza has also been described as similar to the Shenmue games, which means lots of wandering, talking and martial arts (and, hopefully, less asking of repetitive questions about where sailors hang out).

Yakuza is due out sometime this fall. Until then, click on the images to the right to check out the latest bottle-swinging, gangster-stomping shots of the game.

April 25, 2006

Mikel Reparaz
Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.