Today we get to visit an old game that hasn't spent very long in the backlog. Rather I picked it up for little more then I might have spent in the arcade to play a game of Mortal Kombat as a kid, so it was a no brainer to pick up and try. And promising to be "Doom 3 meets Smash TV" it sounded like it could be a really fun time (I love both games). I can't say I was wrong, but I also wouldn't call it as good as either individually. Come on in.
Story: Welcome to Ganymede: a massive leap in progress for mankind. Originally a barren lifeless rock, this giant moon of Jupiter was terraformed and the colony of New Atlantis had a chance to bloom and blossom into the outpost it is today for the future of the species.
Here in this location, Tyler is simple mechanic and today is not one of his best days. The power just died and his boss is on his ass to get it fixed yesterday. But this does not seem to be a normal power outage, as he and his crew soon find out... though only Tyler himself lived through the discovery. The place is infested with alien creatures. Tyler was able to bring the power plant online before escaping, but not before he got a radio call from Corporal Jane Awryn with the worst possible news: this infestation is not limited to the plant. She's been cornered by it in the water treatment facility nearby. This situation is colony wide.
From this basic point you will follow Tyler as he finds himself "recruited" by the local military in their attempts to fend of the invasion and protect the civilian population from this newfound hell in their midst, but don't expect many twists in this tail. This story does progress and even give you a very good reason for every step you and the team you are helping take before the credits roll, but it's all very straight forward and fairly superficial. It's basically enough to function as a story and little else.
In fact the only real twist to this game is a real M. Night Shyamalan moment with a detail revealed as the game is brought to an end, but it's just so dumb that I have to explain it DESPITE it being part of the final cutscene. So if you are sensitive to spoilers, you might want to skip the indented and italicized that follows:
After you finish the last boss onboard the alien mothership itself, you return to join Jane and a Dr. Howard Wiess at the center of it. Your mission, set off an "anti-matter bomb" that will blow the ship up from the inside out. And this is when the rest of the species of alien running the show greet you. In this final cutscene, they admit defeat and explain why they invaded with such force: this bomb. They explain how they were absolutely horrified that mankind had been testing these devices, the smallest of which had atomized large asteroids. But this one? This one that was small enough for a single human to carry was also big enough to destroy the ship and the solar system with it. Setting it off would kill all of mankind, and they were attacking to reclaim the materials used to make it. When begged like this, the good doctor turns off and turns the bomb over to the aliens, who send you home and promise to pull back their forces before leaving.
It is simply put one of the lamest "what a twist" endings I have ever seen in game, movie, or book... ever. If you came here for something satisfying in the fiction, you are sadly in the wrong place.
4/10
Graphics: This game as I put down the mouse and keyboard is almost 20 years old, and it shows. Don't get me wrong while you are playing, the game actually looks quite good for the most part. You will play form a bird's eye view behind Tyler, way up over everything, and from here the detail to the world really does look right. The outside is often dark and rainy, lit only by your shoulder-mounted flashlight, streetlights (when around), and fiery debris.
And when inside this also holds true as well. You will go through offices, maintenance areas, military constructions, and refinery areas without thinking twice since it fits the brilliantly together to show a world that, while a little grimy with the work of terraforming the land to fit human need, suggests both the leisure and utilitarian needs of the people living there. Once again, the lighting backing this is fantastic for the day and still look very good today, enough so I really do need to focus on it for just a second.
This is easily the highlight of the game's technical looks, as everything casts proper shadows or is lit as the light sources would suggest. True, these sources can be a little harder then one would expect now, but for it's time, this really does look absolutely fantastic!
But sadly the creatures and characters populating this world do hold it back a bit more. Don't get me wrong, everyone looks "ok" from the distance you will play the game from, but none of it looks "great." Tyler and his crew look alright in the field as do the aliens, if often far more simplistic then the world might suggest.... but the game tends to use close ups of the models when anyone talks, and these look absolutely terrible.
What we get are dead expressions we are lucky when they blink at all sitting on CGI faces that frankly wouldn't look too far off in the old CGI TV series we used to get in the 1990s thanks to Toy Story being a huge hit. I literally almost cracked up when I first saw this for the first time. It just looked so out of place compared to what the game itself looked like. The cutscenes themselves are not much better as you realize how low detail everything is when in-engine the camera gets up close for conversations like this. It just doesn't look right at all, but hey, at least here the lighting still works as it should, putting it above the profiles.
The end result is a game that while playing looks great if a little old, but looks like ass any time you are made to watch instead... a mixed bag, but one you won't mind so much when blasting away.
6/10
Sound: While the sound certainly fairs better, it does not fair as well as it could have either. Not because of the music though. As demanded, it goes from moody in the dark, to sci-fi-ish metal as the battle heats up, to eerie techno when things are not quite right, this sound track does it all, mixing together just right to make it awesome.
Nor can you blame the sound effects for this. Your machineguns and pulse rifles blast through ammo with satisfying chunks and whirs, while lasers buzz and rockets boom brilliantly. Hell, your shotgun is satisfying as hell just for the meaty boom to rival iD's best! And the aliens that do make noise make it work too, from the thudding feet of heavy soldiers to the screech of smaller terrors to even the biomechanical sounds of later things, it all sounds absolutely brilliant.
No, the issue here is the voice acting, which will strike you as a special kind of bad in this game. It may well be they could only work with what they were given, but personally I found them so out of sync with the situation it was actually kinda funny. (Though those profiles do NOT help this.) You will get used to it by the end, letting the whole thing mesh together as you listen for clues of enemy action (you will know which ones by the end to REALLY listen for), but these voice actors have the potential to take you right out of the game while cutscenes roll.
7/10
Gameplay: And this is probably the strongest of the game. You will see the game from a birds eye view, as noted in the graphics, but when you take up the controls, it's going to feel like a first person shooter. You will aim with the mouse, turning the camera while Tyler remains fixed on the screen while you fire at and doge both the fire and the aliens themselves as the combat gets hot and heavy. Rarely will you just be in the open, instead having a lot of environmental elements like doors (broken or functional) crates, debris, and glass windows, and anything else that might fit a business location (civilian or otherwise) to dance around while dealing death to your opponents, but don't count on it always lasting. A lot of this is destructible, and an alien trying to kill you just might ruin your cover (or you do the same if you choose), keeping the battlefields pretty dynamic, ESPECIALLY for when the game came out.
And while combat is certainly the focus of the game, exploration will also play a strong roll as the environments are designed to give you plenty of space to go before any given chapter is over. These are the moments the atmosphere the game is setting up really shine, letting you just take it all in and enjoy before the next monster that needs to die shows up.
And you will have plenty of tools to get the job done. Along with the trope of exploding barrels conveniently planted throughout the levels of the game, you will collect 10 weapons through your adventure, ranging from your first pistol to explosive weapons and even a few sci-fi treats. And each weapon is balanced differently, making them more or less useful in different scenarios. For example your pistol is what you expect: a weaker gun, but the go-to if you want to preserve your ammunition since the only ammo count is how much is in your current cart. Meanwhile the pulse rifle puts out the damage, but absolutely chews through it's ammo, and a shotgun is devastating up close, but not great until the enemy is basically on top of you. But the game devs were certainly aware of this, for you have an upgrade system to these weapons.
When you kill enemies they will sometimes drop upgrade parts, which you will spend on up to three upgrades to any given weapon, most of the time taking the form of a technical upgrade to improve the weapon's ability, a way to enhance ammo (be it reloading with more ammo, the ability to never need to reload at all provided you have ammo, or even getting more ammo from each pickup for the weapon), and an alternate fire mode. It will be up to you to decide which ones you want to spend on, but unless you are looking to upgrade a favorite, you probably don't need to worry too much about this. By the time you reach the end of the game, you will likely have most of these, for the parts drop fairly readily.
Overall, I am probably painting a very rosy picture about how this game plays for action/horror fans, and that should probably be taken as such for the most part, but that is not to say everything is good. This is the first release of Frozenbyte: a studio now known in particular for their Trine series... and their status as the new kid shows in this game. That upgrade system, for example, is absolutely necessary since while each weapon is balanced differently, it makes some weapons just about useless until you upgrade them, even though the weapons I have in mind as I say this (like the laser rifle) are found later in the game.
This later game slog is also in the levels themselves. When you start up, this game is absolutely fantastic, building itself up with new enemies and weapons almost to the end of it's short run. (I finished the game in about 10 hours.) However, once it runs out of new tricks of this nature, the devs clearly also ran out of ideas. The last few levels are an absolute slog of rinse-and-repeat rooms where you will enter, the door will close, and you will remain there till you kill every enemy that spawns in there, then go to the next room. It is boring, repetitive, and really the only challenge at this point is in the form of ammo management.
Actually the only real challenges this game will offer at this point is one of the more dreaded points in MANY games: your allies. Thankfully these characters appear indestructible so these are not so much escort mission. But they are still dumb as a box of rocks and will just stop in the middle of a small walkway, leaving you stuck to take whatever abuse is coming your way while they just watch: a frustration that gets amplified by the fact that the games does not allow you to save... at all. The only saves you get are the autosaves between each of the 11 levels that make up the game. With the average level taking 40 minutes and some taking well over an hour, suffering a death because your allies are too stupid to not kill you just gets maddening. But at least the devs again understood the weakness as you have 5 lives to complete each level. You can not get any extra lives, but your pool refills at each level. If you die, you will go back to the beginning of the level, but everything you've done remains completed, mediating the frustration some, even as it ramps up towards the end due to one enemy type in particular.
7/10
Bugs: Sadly, I can not say this game ran perfectly. There wasn't anything gamebreaking, but there are definitely issues that defy reason and will frustrate the hell out of you when you hit them (and you will).
- What's with the jitters? This engine is straight up weird. Being an old engine, it will run effectively on a potato and run very well. However, the engine will at times look like it's pressing your hardware as the map scrolls by with a stutter like you wouldn't believe even as the frames churn on. Watching any characters moving will show it as their animations are full speed, most notably Tyler himself since he's stationary on the screen, letting his frames show the best. Even more bizarre, the fix I found was to press them that much more by turning on your flashlight and making the game use it's shadow casting functionality.
- Not all shots register: This is a much bigger problem, however. The point of a SHOOTER game is to shoot the enemy, so when the enemy can ignore shots, that kinda needed to be fixed... but it wasn't. It seems to be most often when the enemy is inactive, but from time to time, you will have enemies straight up ignore the ammo you throw at them.
- Do NOT expect a controller to work right: I know I know, the store says the game has controller support, but what they call controller support and what I call controller support are two VERY different things. This game was designed for a keyboard and mouse first and foremost, and while a controller works, it was added so they could allow for multiplayer, letting players 2-4 use controllers. A single player game is borderline unplayable without using a keyboard and mouse.
- The AI: It's bad enough to be a bug. While in modern times, AI allies have gotten better, they are still looked down upon by most gamers, and with good reason. They always suck. This is an AI system that is now almost 20 years old. Expect the enemy to have trouble figuring out how to get around objects or to reason how to handle where you go... and your allies are no better. UNFORTUNATELY you can not clip or shoot through them, so this stupidity will get in your way in the few missions you have to travel with one or more. These will be the worst parts of the game and with good reason.
Score: The way this game ends, it is tempting to rate this game badly overall, but that wouldn't be fair to the game. Outside of a few specific moments around one specific enemy type (one of the last it introduces) the game is a whole lot of fun, running around and gunning down hoards of alien forces interspersed with slower moments when you are exploring the ruins they left behind to find resources, complete whatever objective you have at the moment, and dealing with the remaining forces still prowling around. Its moody, atmospheric, and just a great time.
What holds it back is really just a set of cutscenes aging badly, the game running out of steam and new ideas just shy of the grand finale, and occasional just plain bad ideas (like that enemy I keep mentioning and the entire ending cutscene). So it's not so much a bad game as clearly a "first game" and one that time has not been kind to. If you like horror themed action games, you can do FAR FAR worse then to pick this one up.
7/10
System Requirements:
- 1.5 Ghz CPU processor
- 512 MB RAM
- Any GPU that supports OpenGL and has 256 MB VRAM
- 1.5 GB hard drive space
- Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10
System Specs:
- Ryzen 7 (5700X) 3.4 Ghz
- 32 GB RAM
- AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT (8 GB VRAM)
- Windows 11 (64 Bit)
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