Dom Robinson reviews

for Xbox

Distributed by
Eidos Interactive Limited

There was no lengthy training section to this title, but you get to learn the basic of moving around and talking to people as you get to meet the people in your team who are scattered around the complex and you'll complete minor parts of the beginning just to meet them. What you'll also realise initially is that while the environment may be nice-looking, the graphics are very jerky indeed. There's nothing like the kind of smoothness you'd expect from a first-person-action game so what were the designers thinking? This is complemented with obvious jaggies. On the plus side, though, the sound fares a little better since as the place crashes down around you, it gives an effective representation of this with sirens and warning tannoy announcements echoing constantly. That said, this isn't exactly original and neither are the SFX of weaponry when a fight kicks off.

You can interact with pretty much everything tangible in the environment, which is fun for a while but since everything seems to weigh the same and how it doesn't matter whether you hit a random guard with a basketball, jug, metal bucket or huge bin from the toilets - or even ramming them with a trolley, this becomes rather tiresome rather quickly and doesn't help you get further on in the game. Go up against someone and you'll find the enemy AI completely lame. You can even shoot those on your side with no apparent consequences to follow. Whoever you kill though, there's no skill to just blasting away, the good/bad guy collapses and then you can just fling their body around to your heart's content like they're a rag doll. Interactivity beyond that seems to extend to no more than selecting the options to take by picking lines of dialogue when the need arises. You can also pick up biomods to boost strength in your arms, head, eye, leg and skeleton, but this is no different to being a human and collecting power-ups - so just like the last game then. But I persevered as long as I could and all I could conclude was that running around in the dark got me so bored to the point where it was making me want to fall asleep. I'm not a big fan of RPG games, which is the genre that's blended in here with the aforementioned FPS and this does nothing to change that fact.

GRAPHICS SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC PLAYABILITY ENJOYMENT
OVERALL

Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2004.