This is Vegas Hands-on Preview

This is Vegas. No, really. This actually is Vegas. The Red Rock Casino Hotel to be exact, about 20 minutes drive from The Strip, or, as much of the assembled video game press found out last week, a $50 cab journey. Still, $50 promises to be a fart in the wind in publisher Midway’s virtual VIP sim. Gambling’s part of the game, and there’s a $5000 limit.

It was telling that publisher Midway left This Is Vegas till the end of its big annual Gamers’ Day presentation, following Wheelman, TNA Impact! and even Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. It granted it the most on-screen time too – a short walk through the demo level that press were soon to be allowed hands on time with. This Is Vegas is Midway’s big hope for 2008. And now, finally, we find out if the ample development spend is going to good use.

Developer Surreal Software, of The Suffering fame, is using a three-level pyramid (perhaps inspired by the Luxor) to conceptualise the game. At the bottom is Grand Theft Auto, or the adult, gangster-oriented open world gameplay mechanic Rockstar has near enough perfected in recent years. Above this is Vegas itself. Well, not quite. You won’t find virtual versions of Bellagio, Caesar’s Palace or Treasure Island to burn your in-game dollars in. Nor will you be able to watch digital trapeze artists defy gravity in virtual Cirque du Soleil shows. This is Surreal’s own version of the city, a hyper Vegas full of saturated colours and with its own clubs, casinos and strip.

And finally, right at the top of the This Is Vegas pyramid, is “fun”. Fun being a recreation of the kind of alcohol-fuelled, money-draining, sexually charged, once in a lifetime night out that helped coin the phrase “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”. In Surreal’s eyes, as we experienced from the demo available for play at Midway’s Gamers’ Day, this means helping a hot female DJ turn a dead club into a banging one by busting shapes on the dance floor via a rhythm combo system, beating up “cheesy bachelors” with devastating slow motion uppercuts, tending bar with the simplest of mini-games and spraying wet t-shirt wannabes with soda water. Really.

Let’s extrapolate. You – a Johnny Knoxville look alike, drive up to Aqua, one of the game’s night clubs, in a smart sports car. Inside you find a female DJ friend of yours in dire straights. The club is as dead as a Barnsley pub on a Tuesday night. What’s worse, the DJ gets a cut of the bar takings, which, by all accounts, will end up barely covering her cab journey home. You offer to help, with half an eye on the game’s overall objective, which is to prevent a millionaire businessman from turning Vegas into the latest family-friendly tourist trap, and the other on her ample bosom and tiny waist.

Getting the party started involves accumulating points within a pre-determined time limit. There are number of ways to do this. First is dancing, which sees you combine button presses with the thumb sticks to rack up points. The better you perform, the more people you’ll attract to the dance floor. They’ll cheer your flawless fancy footsteps and boo when you screw up. Build up enough Buzz, This Is Vegas’ cool factor currency, and you’ll get everyone dancing in sync and multiply your score.

Second is dealing with what the game calls “cheesy bachelors” – not quite the term we’d use to describe them. You need to beat the crap out of them, to put it bluntly. There’s a button for punching – hold for a more powerful swing – a grapple button and the ability to stomp. Build up enough Buzz and you’ll trigger the Buzz Bomb, a slow motion smack that sends the unfortunate lout flying off into the distance like a baby tossing its doll out the cot.

Third is a bar tending mini-game, where you need to serve drinks and light cigarettes as quickly as possible by pressing the button that corresponds with the order. And, to top it all off, there’s a wet t-shirt competition mini-game where you spray three giggling, squirming, scantily clad girls with soda water as quickly as possible. It’s not smart, or sexy, and in the demo the girls’ breast area even went a dull brown colour after we’d done soaking it, something we’re sure doesn’t happen in real life (actually we’re not sure – we’ve never sprayed a woman’s breasts with soda water. If anyone would like to volunteer their services to prove This Is Vegas right…).

Once you’ve turned Aqua from dead house to hard house there’s still plenty of entertainment on offer. Various gambling mini-games, including poker, 21, blackjack and slots, will feature, with the promise of more. But, like much of Surreal’s Vegas, things work a little differently than in real life. You can cheat by looking at marks on the back of dealers’ cards, which tell you whether it’s low, high or 10/ace. You have to keep an eye on the house suspicion meter though. Cheat too much and you’ll be booted out.

You can get steaming drunk too, which plays havoc with the camera but increases your Buzz. Try dancing while inebriated and you’ll fall about the place and crash into annoyed night club goers. Drunkenness wears off pretty quickly though, a process sped up by going to the toilet (if only that worked in real life). But usually you won’t sober up before you’ve thrown up, something that turns off even the horniest of Vegas ladies (that actually does work in real life).

The Gamers’ Day demo made it hard to predict how This Is Vegas is going to turn out. While dragging dead beat clubs into the big time will form a part of what players will find themselves doing in the game world, how often you’ll be doing it and how it fits in with the overall gameplay remains a mystery. The answer to this question, and others, run around our heads as Gamers’ Day comes to an end. There’s plenty to be positive about, but there’s also elements, like the wet t-shirt mini-game, which are at this stage just, naff.

But then the environments and textures are extremely impressive and just about make up for the fact that every character’s face is so shiny you can shave in it. The dancing and gambling are strangely compelling and could end up having decent depth and replay value, especially if Surreal chucks in online leader boards. And there are some nice, intriguing gameplay elements that weren’t playable but were talked about, like helping bring The Chairmen, This Is Vegas’ version of the Rat Pack, back to prominence. Earning reputation with the game’s four factions, named after the four suits of a deck of cards, and unlocking new locations and items as a result, piques our interest too. It’s clear that Surreal has some cool tech and some interesting gameplay possibilities on its hands. Now it’s all about figuring out how it’s going to come together to create a fun game that doesn’t end up being, like we said, naff.

This Is Vegas may well prove to be a hit with sexually frustrated teenagers, but we’ll have to wait to find out whether it can free itself from the shackles of its immaturity and prove popular with men rather than boys – something only some proper extended time with the game will reveal.

This Is Vegas is due out for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in Fall 2008.