PO'ED
SHORT VERSION: This has some early 3D charm/mystery in the environments and level design, and exploring them with a jetpack was fun… but too many levels are boring arenas where you have to deal with the rather shoddy combat and controls.
LONG VERSION: An oddball, early FPS that is somewhat impressive for the time on a technology level, but isn’t particularly great to play…
The humour is something they really tried to sell the game on, and it’s certainly… interesting at times. You’re a chef so your starting weapon is a frying pan, and then you move onto throwing butcher’s knives before you get more bog-standard sci-fi guns. Eventually you get a drill, which covers the screen with blood when used, and you have to pause drilling to wipe it off your face.
There are also some odd enemy designs, the most famous being walking ass monsters who fart turds at you (you can turn off the fart noises in the remaster, not sure if you could in the original).
But these get old fast (if you found them funny in the first place), and most of the game has more conventional weapons, enemies, and levels. You do get little moments here and there later in the game, such as an arena level that starts in a locker room with flushing toilets, but for the most part it’s all front-loaded and the game doesn’t really have much “wackiness” apart from moments here and there.
The game uses an early full 3D engine, which I found the most interesting because I love exploring early 3D spaces… and that was true of a lot of levels here! Some levels are abstract recreations of places such as a reactor, a hanger with spaceships you can get inside, and I loved how alien or dream-like these felt due to the low-poly environments and objects, the low-res textures, and just the bizarre but somewhat recognisable architecture.
In fact, if the game dropped the wacky motif and went more horror, I think it would have worked a lot better…
Some levels are less interesting and just feel like a collection of random blocks, elevators, and ramps, though some got more creative with these to create alien feeling places, like the Tomb level which felt so mysterious, full of odd structures and portals. Some levels are just one big room with a structure or collection of structures in them… some of these were interesting to look at, such as one with a tree full of eyes at the bottom and a boxy, glass diamond shaped structure floating above it. But these were also the worst levels to play because…
The biggest problem is that the combat feels awful. For one thing, enemies are incredibly good at predicting where you’re going to be with their shots, which gets very frustrating and stops you from circle strafing too much… perhaps that was a deliberate choice, but it’s one I found annoying because I’d just get peppered with shots no matter where I went, especially when I was surrounded since I’d dodge one shot, and walk straight into another one from another enemy.
Flying enemies are a nightmare to deal with, due to how small, fast, and erratic they are. If you’ve only got slower moving weapons, good luck, but even if you have hitscan, you still have to lead your shots a lot to hit them and I ended up wasting so much ammo trying to take out these tiny, erratically moving enemies. Doesn’t help that aiming on the Y axis is a bit of a chore.
Half the weapons feel awful to use, and most feel useless against moving enemies unless you’re up in their face.
Levels also feel like they were built first, and then enemies were just peppered in afterwards… there are too many places where the enemy placement and groups don’t feel thoughtful and just there because they needed some there.
Oh yeah, the game also has awful, slippery controls that exacerbates all this. The game is also full of platforming… when you’re just exploring, it’s not too bad, but when you’re jumping around platforms with these slippery controls AND trying to fight enemies, it becomes the height of tedium.
I really did like exploring some of the levels, especially when you get the jetpack, and it was even still fun when you weren’t swamped by enemies… but before too long, too many levels are just big arenas that aren’t interesting to explore, and just throw waves of enemies at you that just aren’t fun to fight due to all the reasons listed.
You can’t even just run by and ignore enemies in a lot of these levels, because while sometimes you just need to locate an exit (in the more exploration focused levels where I tended to ignore enemies), other times the exit wont appear until you kill a certain amount.
OH YEAH, sometimes holographic or secret walls hide the way forward in the level. This happened a lot, actually… luckily they weren’t too hard to find, plus the map helped.
So yes, there are things I enjoyed here, but the tedious combat, inconsistent level design, and slippery controls eventually just forced me to stop playing.
The remaster at least adds some nice QoL stuff and runs much smoother… too smooth, actually, I had to turn some stuff off to stop myself from getting motion sickness.
Odd choice for a remaster, but I guess I’m glad they did it? There is stuff here worth looking at! Just not enough to make me want to finish the game or advise picking this up for more than a few bucks.
