| | Ugh. French developers shouldn't be allowed to take Japanese-sounding names, like "Toka," and publishers shouldn't be allowed to make the backs of games by said developers look like a Japanese beat-'em-up.
The uncontrollable camera from hell shakes, jitters, gets stuck behind things and does its level best to keep you from seeing where you want to go or who your target is most of the time, though a few times it slips up and you actually get a glimpse of what's going on.
Which isn't pretty. The hand-to-hand combat features you alternately pressing Punch and Kick, just for a sake of variety, since neither seems particularly preferable and in any event more often than not your highly trained operative will just end up flailing at empty space because the targeting is still aiming at a dead guy. The best part was when I was being shot by baddies behind a locked door and the game kept making me try to attack them (through the locked door) instead of hitting the man standing next to me blasting me with a shotgun. A runner-up was when I picked up a trashcan (accidentally) and flung it through the locked door, smiting the unseen (except for their hands, which clipped through the door) guys on the other side.
The controls are an overly complicated mess. The game feels like it has poltergeists--they shake the camera, they move you around when you're standing still shooting at people, they cause you to sachet around your intended target instead of busting him in the chops and they're also somehow involved in the "plot" with aliens and gang members and so forth.
The missions it sends you on are frustrating key hunts on multiple overlapping levels with no map where the "guide" arrow frequently changes its mind about which way it should be pointing in the middle of a corridor. Then the poltergeists whip the camera around 180 degrees, another flock of bad guys respawn in the room you just left and attack you from the camera's blind side, time runs out and thus you die, only to respawn immediately in the exact same spot, automatically using your "power" move that consists of you shrugging your shoulders as a blue circle appears around your feet and somewhere, no doubt, the game is clubbing poorly animated baby seals. Listen, you can almost hear their horrible death cry sound effects. |
|
|