| | Let's just get the obvious pun out of the way: this game is a disaster. You start out on what looks suspiciously like the Golden Gate Bridge after a massive earthquake ("2000 people" are dead or (?) missing! OMG!), and you have to wander around the just-collapsing wreckage, drinking water, and, presumably, getting to safety eventually.
The water thing is an attempt to make this feel like a "survival" game, I guess. After bumbling around the bridge for ten minutes or so, my water gauge was near empty. Fortunately, I found a working spigot! Whew! :p
So maybe you're thinking, "Where's the bad here, Paleface? I like earthquakes, and I like drinking water. How can this go wrong?" Okay, fair enough. Let's get to the bad.
Framerate. The framerate is dire. You feel it chunkin' as soon as you start moving around your wrecked tram car at the start of the game, and then you crest the peak of a shattered piece of bridge, and see the other part of the bridge across a broken gap, and the framerate seriously tanks, and that's when you know that this game was not well made.
You'll also notice that it looks bad. Up close everything is very flat and lacking in detail. The lighting is sickeningly even and washed out. Character animation is sometimes decent, like when you're climbing over something, but often wooden, like when you're...walking.
The camera is really horrible. It likes looking more downward than outward, and you can't control the pitch (this might have been a last-minute attempt to control the framerate). Turning it, as you must do manually, with a single shoulder button (?) is a chore, and usually doesn't help much due to the pitch problem. It's just awful, and you wish it would go away and let you play in the dark.
Nevertheless, I persevered, stumbling around everywhere, slowly, and aimlessly because I couldn't see very far ahead due to the camera (this was outside in bright day, mind you), until I came to a gap in a certain stairway I had to climb. Text popped up to say that the game would auto-jump at ledges. Okay, let's go then. Walk up to the ledge and...fall. Thanks, auto-jump. Now I was back on the lower flight, slightly injured, and looking at spending a few minutes just working my way back up to that spot. No thanks. Game over, man. |
|
|