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Cartoon Crime Open-World Crime Game Switches Perspectives on the Fly
What happens if you take the freedom of a modern open-world crime game, give it the overhead perspective of an old-school arcade sandbox and let players switch between the two whenever they want? That is the central idea behind Cartoon Crime, an Early Access PC game from Istanbul-based BuBa Games, a two-person indie team building both the game and its underlying technology themselves.
Available now through Steam Early Access, Cartoon Crime drops players into a colourful open world filled with story missions, vehicles, street fights, police pursuits and plenty of distractions when following the objective marker sounds less appealing.
Its most distinctive feature is the ability to instantly swap between third-person action and a classic top-down camera without leaving the world or changing the current gameplay state, like a hybrid Grand Theft Auto.
Cartoon Crime Lets You Cause Trouble From Two Perspectives
The third-person camera brings players closer to gunfights, driving and exploration, while switching overhead gives the same streets a much more old-school crime-game feel.
Beyond missions, players can earn money, buy weapons, improve their character and recruit bodyguards who join them during fights. Shops, gyms, restaurants and cinemas can be entered, while bowling, billiards and arcade machines provide quieter distractions between police chases. The official gameplay trailer gives a broader look at that sandbox in motion, including its driving, combat and perspective switching.
The Wild West Is Only the Latest Addition
BuBa Games has been expanding Cartoon Crime rapidly since its August 26 Early Access debut. Update 8 arrived on October 14 with an entire Wild West-inspired desert region, taking players into Redstone Canyon, Dustwing Airfield, a nuclear facility and volcanic islands.
New rally cars, armoured vehicles and drivable desert tanks joined the sandbox, while the Beneath the Sand mission sent players underground to deal with tunnel spiders and desert scorpions. Police became more aggressive too, with officers spotting trouble faster and leaving their vehicles more often, while performance during pursuits and co-op synchronisation received further work.
The team has already followed that with Update 9 on October 20, adding functional steam trains, zombies surrounding the nuclear plant and two hidden underground laboratories filled with alien experiments and crashed UFOs. Five-star pursuits can now escalate far enough for police tanks to join the chase.
Two Developers Are Building Cartoon Crime and Its Engine
The scale becomes more unusual considering BuBa Games consists of only two developers. Developer Burhan Doygun shared that the pair also built the technology powering Cartoon Crime, using their own C++ and OpenGL engine rather than adopting an established commercial engine.
That means the same small team is handling the engine, development tools and gameplay systems required for vehicles, police AI, combat, interiors and its two camera perspectives.
Cartoon Crime remains firmly in Early Access, with BuBa estimating around six to 12 months of development before the full release. More missions, locations, vehicles and systems are planned as the sandbox continues to grow.
For now, its appeal is easy to understand: two developers are steadily building a colourful crime sandbox where going off-script is encouraged, and even the way you look at the chaos can change at the press of a button.
