Demonic Gerbil

Hearts of Iron 3 is the third game in a series of World War 2 strategy games by Paradox Interactive. The game takes place primarily on a map of the world, which can be zoomed in and out from closeups of a small region of the conflict to a grand world map. It's here that you can scheme, plan, and direct your armies around the field of battle.

Other screens contain other functions: diplomacy, industrial production, research, local politics, and espionage. Each of these screens can be automated, along with your military's actions.

I should note that this review is based on an early version of the game, which if you know Paradox means that the game does not actually work as advertised, or in some cases at all.

On the diplomacy screen you can negotiate trades for crucial resources, declare war, or influence other countries. It's all pretty straightforward. Having said that, the diplomacy system is utterly and completely broken. Every country in the game, with a scant few exceptions, will join the allies very quickly after the outbreak of hostilities. This includes Finland, which was a co-belligerent on the side of Germany against Russia, and Switzerland, which hasn't fought a war in a very long time. Even active diplomacy by the Axis can't prevent Finland from running to join the Allies, or the general cascade of nations joining the Allies.

It's not even just that everyone wants to hang out with Great Britain. Much of the diplomatic system is based around 'threat' levels. The more wars you fight, the more threat you gain. Unlike in the real world, when Japan fights China, a minor Warlord state, such as the Guangxi Clique quickly generates 40-something threat and kicks off the mass exodus of independent states into the Allies in 1937. This pattern repeats almost invariably. The only solution for a second World War that makes sense is to skip the diplomatic system and start the game sometime after hostilities have started between historical enemies, and this only means that nations that were neutral will join in at some later point, instead of earlier.

The production screen has a set of sliders to allocate your industry to various tasks, such as building new units or creating supplies. Your unit production queue will produce independent brigades, whole divisions - which can be customized at production time - and new province-level buildings such as industry or anti-aircraft guns. This screen has to be micromanaged if you wish to produce the things you actually want without wasting industry because of bad slider settings. In general you need to check this once a day to micromanage your sliders. If you set the screen to be automated by the AI, you then lose control over your production queue, but it at least micromanages your sliders for you. You can, at least, turn automation on and off and add things to the queue that way, but it's an inelegant solution.

The research screen consists of a set of sliders to manage a resource called "Leadership" and a panel that contains dozens of technologies to be researched. Leadership is spent on diplomacy, research, spies, and officers for the army. Thus if you want to be active diplomatic as the Axis, as futile as that is, you'll cut into your ability to be effective on the battlefield. Research at least is simple: click on a technology, click the research button, and as long as you have enough research allocated on the leadership sliders it takes care of itself. This screen too can be automated, but the AI makes terrible choices when allocating leadership.

The politics screen shows the people in your nation's government, lets you change them, gives various pointless details such as the popularity of political parties, has a panel to change the laws which govern the state, and another panel to deal with occupied countries. There's not a whole lot to look at here, really. It doesn't need to be micromanaged at all.

And finally the spy screen lets you distribute spies created by the allocation of leadership. There's a wide variety of missions that spies can undertake, some of which can be very useful. The AI does a fair job of handling the boring details on this screen for those who don't want to babysit their spies.

And finally we come back to the map screen and the armies. It's a mess. Hearts of Iron 3 is less a game about fighting World War 2 than it is a game about micromanaging your Theatre, Army Group, Army, and Corps headquarters units. Here you have two choices, you can either let the AI fight, and it does a fair job of it, though it makes some hilariously baffling choices like randomly disbanding HQ units at the corps level and kicking divisions out of its control, or you can try to manage the chaos, in which case you'll quickly grow exasperated by moving dozens of HQ units around and fiddling with officers in charge of them. You can go down a third path and put most units under AI control, and keep some for yourself, which seems to work well.

The AI loves splitting navies and air units up into dozens and dozens of single- or two-unit forces, squandering them in ways so that the other AI can pick off stragglers. Granted the opposition does the same thing, so at least fair is fair.

There's a huge bug with managing all of these units yourself. At least some of the panels that control the army and its leaders have some bug which means that the game slows massively down when you reassign officers to various units. Do it enough times and the game turns in Snails of Iron 3 and then eventually crashes and dies.

Speed is a major issue. There are reports of people with blazing systems running several times slower than people with older single-core Pentium 4 systems. This is bad programming, bad optimization. Turning the political view of the map on, so you can see who controls what territory by the colors on the map slows the game down. Going into the production window and adding 10 things to the queue slows the game down. Everything slows the game down. In a five hour session, I made it from 1936 to 1937. The game later crashed in the middle of 1937, with a corrupted savegame so I couldn't pick it back up.

You'll notice I haven't really talked about what it's like to fight World War 2 yet, how combat works, and so on. The reason is simple, I haven't actually gotten to fight World War 2 for more than a couple of in-game weeks before the game either crashes or starts to take an unreasonable amount of time for each in-game hour to tick by.

What good is a game set in World War 2 if you can't actually fight in World War 2?

Now for a quick scoring summary for those of you keeping track of the numbers:

Gameplay: 2

I like a lot of the ideas. Being able to automate whatever is boring is great. Slowdown, really bad automation, and well, slowdown again, just kill it. This game is not actually playable by anyone who isn't a blind fanboy.

Graphics: 5

Adequate. What good is a 3D engine that renders the world in so ugly a fashion? Plus it's counter-based, it's not like counters are that good looking, though they convey lots of information in a tiny space.

Sound: 7

Solid, inoffensive, and completely non-annoying. Not a single complaint.

Replay: 7

If it works, there's lots of cool things you can do. Navigate Germany peacefully through expansion, go on a warmongering spree as England, and so on. Plenty of what ifs to try out.

Other: N/A

Do not buy this game now. Maybe in a year or two after this review, buy the game. Paradox will undoubtedly bundle crucial bug fixes into an expansion, so it will be cheaper to buy the fixed game and expansion later, than it will be to buy the broken and unplayable trainwreck that exists currently.

Overall: 2

As it stand, Hearts of Iron 3 gets a major thumbsdown. I can't recommend it in this state to anyone. Paradox is banking on their reputation as fixing their games to generate sales, and I hope they do fix it. But they should feel ashamed at releasing Hearts of Iron 3 when it so obviously was not ready even for beta testing.

F.E.A.R. 2 is the long awaited sequel to F.E.A.R. It is a first person shooter (FPS) with a horror-twist. The horror comes courtesy of Japan and its "little evil girl" genre of films (think Ring). It's a pretty good time in general.

The controls are what you would expect of a modern shooter, and the on-screen tutorial as you play through the first portion of the game is enough to teach what you need to know. I'm not going to go into detail here, suffice it to say that if you've played any other FPS of relatively modern vintage you've got a pretty idea of what to expect here. About the only thing I can knock the game for in this regard is the use of button mashing quick-time events, which is something I've never cared for in any game. Those are pretty rare, and don't detract from the flow of the game.

There's a nice variety of weaponry available in FEAR 2, from standard machine guns and shotguns to laser and other energy weapons. There are also four kinds of grenades, useful for fighting the different kinds of enemies that are around. Add in a sniper rifle for duels with enemy snipers, and rocket launchers to handle the heaviest of enemy units and you've got all the basics covered. A personal favorite weapon is the laser, which can sever limbs from the enemy - though it burns through ammunition very quickly. The automatic shotgun is another fun weapon, combining the punch of the shotgun with a faster firing and reloading rate, essential in close quarters. Once in a while the game gives you the option of piloting a powerful suit of power armor, or manning a gun turret, both of which are welcome changes of pace in the action.

There's a variety of enemies which attempt to use tactics such as flanking the player or using grenades to flush the player out of cover. More than once I found myself with an enemy that had worked his way around behind me using cover. The enemies come in various types: Amarcham security, replica soldiers, mercenaries, the big heavy robotic power suits, and the crazy dead people who can animate all the corpses around them as weapons. The power suits are dangerous when encountered outside of the security of a suit of your own, and require the use of electric grenades, terrain, and every rocket you can find to down. The last kind of enemy, the ones that are dead but don't seem to know it, make for frantic encounters as the ghostly enemy runs around and uses other corpses like puppets to fight the player. The fights are both fast paced and graphically cool, with the ghost literally pulling the corpse-puppets' strings. If each kind of the regular 'soldier' type enemies with guns had a few more body models, the variety of the encounters would help keep things from ever getting stale, but as it is after a while you've seen all the enemies and it starts to feel like you're killing the same three or four people over and over.

The plot of FEAR 2 parallels and takes place in the aftermath of the original game. Your team is sent in to deal with the Amarcham corporation and grab one of the antagonists. Things quickly go south and before you know it, you're surrounded by clone soldiers, mercenaries, and hallucinations with series antagonist Alma messing with your mind. The plot feels somewhat stronger in this game, than in the first FEAR (or its expansions) with less of what I like to call "people doing stupid things to advance the plot." The main character's team seems well developed in FEAR 2, less like cardboard cut-outs like the supporting cast in the original. The scare factor tends to fall flat, with me, though, just like in the first game. Having said that, there were still some moments of the game that gave me a terrible feeling of dread. Scattered through the game are items that can be picked up to advance the back-story, shedding light on what's happening through the game.

The environments for the most part are better built and more interesting than the places in the first FEAR. My favorite level was at an elementary school. Not only was it somewhat surreal to fight my way through classrooms, the cafeteria, and so on, but the area was structured in a way that didn't require any backtracking. Picking up the intel items and reading about the back-story at the school only made things stranger, and really started to creep me out by the time I had finished the area. Pretty much all of the game's areas are linear and don't require backtracking. To me in a shooter this is mostly a plus, though I understand that a lot of people don't like such linearity. Avoiding the specter of backtracking, getting lost, and wasting time going places I've been before is pretty nice, though.

The graphics are great. Enemies look good, the guns look good, special effects are good, the terrain is good; I really have no complaints. The sound is great; mostly because the music is pretty awesomely chosen. The voice acting is solid enough. The Amarcham black ops mercenary leader is a great antagonist, and his voice acting had me cursing him out as the game went on.

Now for a quick scoring summary for those of you keeping track of the numbers:

Gameplay: 8

Good controls. Toggling in and out of slow motion is kind of cliche in shooters anymore, but it serves to give the player a good edge over the enemies in the game; it's rarely required to defeat enemies. With its variety of weaponry and enemies with different weaknesses, the actual shooting action rarely gets boring or stale. The button mashing events that intersperse the game are somewhat lame, but for some reason the game industry seems to like them these days.

Graphics: 9

I love the graphics. I really love the static noise effect in the player's vision which steadily gets worse the closer to the end of the game the player gets. It helps set a tone of how much everything is spiraling out of control, but in a subtle sort of way.

Sound: 9

Love the music, everything else sits on the border between great and good.

Replay: 3

I'm not sure I'll replay the game. If I do it'll be so I can collect all the intel items scattered around and get every little scrap of back-story. I don't know anyone else who has FEAR 2, so I haven't been able to give multiplayer a try with people I'd actually like to gank, so this rating is based on the single-player experience.

Other: N/A

A lot of people have had trouble with the game as distributed via Steam. I haven't had any trouble like that, but it's something to keep in mind when you purchase the game.

Overall: 8

FEAR 2 is a great shooter with few flaws in its gameplay. Good controls, fun enemies with a lot of different weapons to shoot them with. The scare factor is probably too low for most of its intended audience. It looks and sounds great with lots of atmosphere. It's a must play for shooter fans. Horror fans might want to give it a try as well, because the game does pretty well at establishing the right kind of feel.

F.E.A.R. (and I'm not going to type all those periods again) is getting to be a bit of an old game at the time of this writing, nearly four years after its release. I remember thinking when it first came out that it didn't sound all that interesting to me. The sequel, which recently was released, did catch my eye, so I thought it would be appropriate to play the original and hope that it would give me an idea of what was going on when I loaded up the sequel. And that leads us to this review.

FEAR feels a lot like playing Shogo, which shouldn't be a surprise considering they share developers. FEAR is a first person shooter that imports the tropes of recent Japanese horror movies, producing a sort of FPS-Survival Horror hybrid. It succeeds as a shooter, but generally falls flat as a horror experience.

Like most modern shooters, the controls handle well and are generally intuitive. They're also highly configurable, an option I noticed only after my fingers had gotten used to the default layout. My only gripe with the controls is that too often I found myself hitting G (which throws a grenade) instead of F (to interact with an object), or hitting Z (using a med kit) instead of X (toggle my flashlight on and off). Maybe that's not a problem for anyone else, but I wish I'd changed the controls to make that a non-issue before I had gotten used to the default controls. Only being able to carry three weapons at a time is also a bit of a downer, though I can understand from balance reasons why the limit exists. I would have preferred a system more in-line with Crysis where you can carry two main weapons, your pistol sidearm, and then a heavy weapon. Ultimately this is just a minor nitpick because guns come and go so often in FEAR that what you drop in one fight is likely going to be found just one or two firefights down the line.

The enemies are smart, very smart, or at least seem to be. They use smart tactics, rushing at the player when they have numerical superiority or using grenades to flush the player out of cover. They try actively to get behind the player and generally make a nuisance of themselves. The foot soldiers are great fun to fight against. Later in the game, robots and flying robots appear. These are much more dangerous than the normal enemies, and also are generally less fun to fight against, appearing in groups too small to use any interesting tactics the fights devolve into contests of who has more really big guns. Later on ghost-like enemies appear and attack as well, though they're more of an annoyance than a threat except in very large numbers.

The situation that pits you against these foes is somewhat cliché. A top secret military research project goes crazy and starts killing everyone. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, the research project was a crazy psychic with an army of clone soldiers that mentally controls. This is bad. So the government sends in FEAR, a small strike team dedicated to dealing with paranormal threats. You, the player, are the newest FEAR member. What a way to start your career.

As you go in to start investigating, the player character starts tripping out and hallucinating. Visions of hospital rooms, a man with a moustache, a little girl, and the crazy cannibal psychic you're supposed to be shooting flit across the screen in brutal succession. As the game wears on you can discover clues by listening to phone messages and searching laptops. To an extent the game tries to copy the story telling techniques of the venerable System Shock games, fleshing out back story as needed as the game progresses through recordings left by the people involved. This is always a nice change of pace from the more sedate Resident Evil plot advancement technique of stopping everything and forcing the player to read a couple paragraphs of text.

Shooting is a joy in the game, but it's interrupted frequently for the horror part of the game. Sometimes it's just a grotesque image appearing on the screen for a moment, other times the player is transported to an alternate world of fire and ghosts, other times the geometry changes around the player, or drops the player into a pool of blood, and so on. It's shocking the first few times, but the novelty wears off quickly. Far more effective in being creepy are the people that appear for a few moments then fade away, or the (not so) random sightings of the creepy little girl in an area. Maybe I'm jaded and knew too well what to expect from watching the Japanese horror movies that the game steals its tropes from, but except for a few moments the scares were mostly predictable. Still, the game tries pretty hard on the scare factor, and it's mostly well done. I didn't find myself rolling my eyes and wanting the scary scenes to be finished, even at the end of the game, at least.

The various characters you meet throughout the game lack the charm to really make it feel emotional when some of them inevitably die or meet some other bad end. The phone messages and radio chatter don't convey enough character and emotion to make the cast seem like more than cardboard cutouts. This is one of the few points where the developers missed the mark. Either better writing, or better voice actors, would have really helped. The one character that does have enough personality to be interesting is the villain you chase through the game, which helps to keep interest in the game going.

The other place that the developers miss the mark is in the environments. FEAR is full of offices and concrete walled crawlspaces and, it felt like, little else. Environments often have two ways through them, but they lead inevitably to the same place. Paths often curl about and double back on themselves, which actually helps prevent backtracking, since when they do loop around, it's because you've hit a switch and opened a door, and the path then leads you back to that naturally via an alternate route instead of expecting the player to hoof it back over a path that's been traversed already. That's not always the case, and the few times where the game doesn't naturally provide a way back to the unlocked door can be a bit confusing. It's also not always immediately clear where to go, despite the game being very linear in the paths. The level design is therefore kind of mediocre and repetitive.

Now for a quick scoring summary for those of you keeping track of the numbers:

Gameplay: 8

Good, tight controls. Mostly intuitive layout on the keyboard. Enemies are well balanced, and there's a great selection of firearms. Some frustration with the robotic enemies exists, though. And there's also slo-mo that can be toggled on and off, but that's sort of an overdone feature in many shooters these days and barely rates this mention of it.

Graphics: 8

Even compared to its contemporaries, FEAR isn't that good looking of a game. It pulls off the Japanese-inspired horror effects pretty well.

Sound: 8

Sound effects are crisp and appropriate. The ambient music fits the game perfectly. The voice acting is merely adequate.

Replay: 3

I don't think there's much reason to replay FEAR. Not with two expansion packs and a sequel to give similar gameplay without having to go through the same boring levels again. It might be worth playing through again and finding all of the phone messages and such to decipher more of the story, but I have a feeling that won't be enough to get me to replay it.

Other: N/A

Sadly I haven't been able to give multiplayer a try, so this review is based entirely on the single player experience.

Overall: 8

A very good shooter in most respects. It tries for a different ambience than most of its genre does, and pulls the horror effects off with mixed success. It's a pretty unique experience, and considering that the price of the game is down to ten bucks at places like Best Buy there's really not much excuse in not picking it up and giving it a try.

BioShock is the spiritual sequel to the System Shock games, which you may be able to deduce by noting a similarity in their names. There are a lot more similarities than that in the games, but we'll get to it in due time.

BioShock is a first person shooter (FPS) which combines elements of roleplaying games into the FPS structure. With the various in-game currencies (Money and Adam) and the weapon upgrade stations the main character's abilities are highly tailorable and get stronger as the game goes, even beyond just acquiring bigger guns.

Right off the bat, I'm just going to say this: BioShock is beautiful. I can't speak for how it looks with the graphics turned down, but with them cranked up the lighting was gorgeous and the art deco styling of the submerged city of Rapture were rendered lovingly in their full glory. If you have a system which is contemporary to this review and pretty beefy for its time, just stop reading the review and get BioShock. Your eyes are in for a feast that's worthwhile even if the rest of the game was trash. Fortunately the rest of the game is anything but junk.

The controls handle fluidly and intuitively, and the only real trouble I ran into was with ammunition management. Movement is responsive, aiming is as good as it gets in a FPS. Each weapon has a very different feel, and the wide variety of Plasmids bring great versatility to the tactics available.

Oh I didn't mention the Plasmids? They're essentially the magic of the game. You can shoot fire, freeze enemies in ice, or if you really want to do something unique you can shoot bees from your hand. New Plasmids can be found in the game world, earned by doing research on enemies, or bought from upgrade stations in exchange for Adam.

Adam is important stuff, much of the game is based around it. The enemies you fight, the so-called Splicers, have access to Plasmids as well. The iconic Little Sisters and Big Daddies harvest Adam. One of your goals is, of course, to accumulate lots of Adam so you can use it to 'splice' new Plasmids into yourself. There's a lot of Adam around in the game, but there's not enough of it to turn the player into an expert at everything. You'll have to make choices, and the game is balanced enough that you can employ a wide-range of different choices and still find success. There are stations around the submerged city of Rapture that allow you to change your Plasmid layout on the fly, so if it turns out that shooting fire out of your hand just isn't your thing, you can swap something else in instead.

There's a variety of guns, each with several different kinds of ammo. Managing the ammo is the only thing I had trouble with while playing, and often the half-second or so of lag (and sometimes swearing) was enough time to let the enemy get in a hit or two on me while changing from regular bullets to armor piercing. For weapons you have a simple revolver, a tommy gun, a shotgun, a crossbow, a chemical sprayer, and of course the wrench to hit people with. The basic guns are pretty self-explanatory, letting you fire munitions tailored for anti-personnel or anti-armored target work. The crossbow has one bolt which strings up electrified tripwires, enabling elaborate traps. The chemical sprayer can spray fiery napalm, freezing liquid nitrogen, or even lightning, letting it mimic the effects of some Plasmids. Ammo is relatively plentiful, even if the enemy doesn't drop much, there are still good supplies laying around and if desperation sets in there is always a vending machine somewhere nearby to purchase from.

Enemies come in a disappointingly small variety, considering that Adam lets splicers change almost anything about themselves. I really had been hoping to see some really strange looking enemies in the game, but most opponents were boringly too-human, even if horribly grotesque human. The general darkness of the game also worked against it here, cloaking the enemy models in detail obscuring shadow all too often. The Big Daddies are a sight to behold, especially the first time one appears; the tenth or so Big Daddy isn't so fresh and wonderful, the luster wearing off quickly. Little Sisters aren't really enemies, but the game early on gives you a choice: kill them for more Adam now, or save them from having to produce Adam for less immediate gains. The animation for all the characters is well done, but the animation used when healing the Little Sisters is particularly nice to watch with great lighting effects coming into play as the effect spreads.

The sorts of tasks given out are pretty standard things for a FPS: go here, kill those guys, get that thing, click that button, and so on. The dialogue and narration linking the tasks together is top-notch and of games like this only the venerable System Shock 2 strings together a more compelling narrative. The story progresses through various means. Obvious is in-person dialogue either spoken to your character, though there's little of that past the intro, or just chatter from enemies setting the mood and tone. Various people, including the game's two big characters, Andrew Ryan, who runs Rapture, and Atlas, who's leading the popular uprising against Ryan, contact the player over his radio. This is generally how the player gets whatever task the current mission is. The back story leading up to the player's involvement in Rapture is laid out through tape recordings that can be found scattered all over the game. These recordings are often insightful, cool, or just generally amusing, and they serve to gradually reveal the madness that's set in on the city.

I'm going to skimp on discussing the story's plot except to note that it seems somewhat weak to me, but having said that, it's well told and compelling. The big plot twist comes somewhat out of left field, I think, but once it's happened it helps make sense of some of the things that the player's been through.

Now for a quick scoring summary for those of you keeping track of the numbers:

Gameplay: 10

Really great gameplay. Polished controls and a wide variety of weapons and powers to pick and choose from, which help keep things fresh. The difficulty curve seems a little steep, because even performing research to get damage bonuses enemies seemed to exist solely to soak up unacceptable amounts of ammunition from my guns.

I also haven't mentioned hacking before now, but it's a handy tool to turn robots, or defenses against your enemies. It also lets you open safes and such. Sadly hacking has a sometimes annoying minigame associated with it. Losing the minigame costs the player health, so there's always a risk to trying to hack things. Fortunately if you're loaded with cash, most things let you spend cash to skip the hacking minigame.

Graphics: 10

It's not that things in BioShock are beautifully rendered, though they are. It's not that the setting is unique, which it is. The retro-styling of Rapture won me over, and would have gotten the game a 10 from me anyway. Fortunately the game is great looking and a real joy to watch.

Sound: 8

The sound is very well done. The music is appropriate, the voice acting is well done, and the sound effects are generally great.

Replay: 2

I think BioShock is a game I'll revisit in a year or so to relive the experience. Being able to swap my Plasmids around during a single game is a blessing in that it doesn't tie me down to a single playstyle, but it's a curse in that I get to fiddle with multiple builds during the course of a single game. The choice of killing or saving the Little Sisters also doesn't provide much incentive to replay the game immediately because ultimately it really only changes the far too short endings.

Other: N/A

I'm not sure what I was expecting from BioShock, but what was delivered was not it. It's still quite an awesome game, but I don't think it lives up to all the promises that were made. For instance, enemies were supposed to have motivations for what they do other than simply shooting the player a lot. This is true for the Big Daddies and Little Sisters, at least until you shoot at them, but the Splicers throughout the game are, except for a few rare incidents, pretty much just out to get the player. The level layouts also don't feel right to me, a little too contrived and a little bit too unlike actually being in buildings maybe. Once I shed myself of these notions and accepted the game for what it was, the experience turned out to pleasantly surprise me.

Overall: 9

BioShock would get a 10 from me, except that I simply don't feel compelled to replay it. It's not long-enough to make a replay daunting, it's just that there doesn't seem to be enough meat there for a second trip through. Having said that, it's an incredible experience that I can recommend to any fan of first person shooters, and virtually every fan of videogames out there.

By elizibar at 2009-03-06

I was over there revising a review I'd written (for Pirates of Dark Water, Genesis version) because it was written at like 3 AM and was crappy, and it showed. I happened to notice that I had a shiny star next to one of my other reviews in a list. So I went and looked at what that means. Apparently that particular review with the star (for Far Cry 2) is in the top 2% of rated reviews on gamefaqs.com. Does that make me a celebrity or something?

Just not very fun.

The Pirates of Dark Water is an awesome cartoon, and it spawned a Super NES and a Genesis game. The games loosely follow the plot of the cartoon: Ren, prince of a kingdom, travels the world collecting treasures to destroy the evil and eponymous Dark Water which is slowly destroying the world. Ren and his friends have to battle through the forces of the evil pirate Bloth who is trying to stop them.

Pirates of Dark Water is a side-scrolling brawler-type game, which was a pretty popular genre at the time the game was made. It is, sadly, not a notable entrant into the genre. This isn't Final Fight or Streets of Rage. It's a very workman-like game, and its production values reveal its nature as a tie-in game. The animation is not very good, the sound isn't very good, and controls are only adequate, with the standard range of abilities for the player characters. Really, the main redeeming feature is that the character designs are very slick, and if the game's palette was tuned a little better they would really pop off of the screen.

Punch, kick, jump, sprint are the main tools in the player's arsenal, and with only a few exceptions they're all that's needed to plow through one stage after another. There are three characters to pick from: Ren, the 'balanced' character, Tula, the fast and weak girl, and Ioz, the slow and strong one. Notable enemies include the pirate Bloth and the Lug Brothers, who are also the real challenges in the game, and are quite difficult obstacles to get past. The enemy isn't too smart for the most part, being more annoying than tough to defeat, and it's easy to take advantage of any traps and the like on the battlefield. The enemy also doesn't have nearly enough variety among the sprites you beat up, making the affair repetitive as the levels wear on.

Now for a quick scoring summary for those of you keeping track of the numbers:

Gameplay: 6

Boring, but solid gameplay. There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just not polished or inspired.

Graphics: 3

The sprites desperately need a few more frames of animation to smooth the experience out. I think that most sprites and animations are done with three frames at most. Adding more sprites to provide visually different enemies to pound upon is also a must. The sprites that do exist are good looking and well represent the characters and enemies from the cartoon, bringing its style to life in a mostly okay way.

Sound: 4

People always say the Genesis has terrible sound, but having played the SNES version of Pirates of Dark Water, I can assure you that the game just has poor sound, period.

Replay: 1

After slogging through and beating the game once, I have no desire whatsoever to do it again.

Other: N/A

You know what they say about movie tie-in games? It applies here too.

Overall: 4

It's a little worse than average for its time, and pales in comparison to more modern action game experiences. However if you're a fan of the cartoon, it's worth a playthrough just to experience the fun of beating Bloth up.

Great game, review under the cut.

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BEHOLD

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Between the time I left campus and the time I got home, this one had already been approved and posted up at: http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/review/R105535.html

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