He’s like a cross between Sam Fisher and Agent K, only with a broken grumpiness inhibitor.
The game is broken up into four parts which you can play in any order, but the overall story still make the most sense when you do them in numerical order. The controls suck, but I blame myself for part of that. I spent probably half an hour trying to calibrate a controller to it but got mixed results. Eventually I settled on a semi-custom keyboard and mouse. I also put autoaim on because the camera makes it hard enough.
Part I: Dark Reign of the Vampire King
Monsters: Werewolves/Vampires
You’re sent to this little town in Germany, to deal with the reappearance of werewolves in the area. Before that though, you have to go through this long tedious debriefing at HQ. You get paired up with a female dhampir named Svetlana. I went through the talking with every character and got some weapons. I headed to the door to leave with Svetlana following me and, much to my annoyance, became trapped between her and the wall. She wouldn’t fucking move, so I had to restart. This is a theme that happens occasionally throughout the game and the funny thing is that you don’t even need a retarded NPC to do it. You can get permanently lodged in between two grave markers or stuck on a chain link fence all by yourself.
Once you actually get to play, the game is just OK. I was turned off by most of the combat in the town and the castle. It’s hard to see what you’re doing when you’re in a mess of buildings or a narrow corridor with a bunch of doors and then you have something the size of a horse flying directly above you that you need to shoot but isn‘t even on screen. Also a lot of the levels are huge and elaborate which is typically good. But you’ll think you’ve been everywhere and you still can’t figure out how to progress. Then you find that you were supposed to go through some tiny alley that’s completely obscured from your vision by the shitty camera angle.
However, the forest in between the castle and town is awesome. You go in at night during a thunderstorm knowing it’s infested with werewolves. For a long time nothing happens. You find a wrecked carriage with a dead horse and you can see the wolves sometimes moving around behind trees in the dark. Then suddenly, without warning, you get gang raped by like five of them at once. So with that in mind, the level is still good.
Part II: Tomb of the Underground God
Monsters: Werewolves/Zombies/Insect Hellspawn
This is how the whole game should have been. You start out on a train that gets attacked by vengeful werewolves from part I. This doesn’t seem to be much of a problem considering that for every one time you get clawed by a werewolf you’ll fall off the train and die about 15 times.
So you make it to your real mission which has to do with a western ghost town overrun by zombies. Well, a few people still live there actually. You have to find the remaining townsfolk and take them to the church. This didn’t really make much sense to me because if the dead are rising, why would you want to be in a building that’s nestled in a cemetery? Typically I absolutely hate escort missions but at some point while leading an inbred she-beast in a muumuu and her American Gothic of a husband through a field while fending off curious zombie cows with an axe, I decided that this is actually the most fun I’ve had playing a videogame in a while.
Of course it wasn’t without it’s problems. I kept on getting shotgun shells but I never actually found a damn shotgun. This was also a problem in the castle in part I. I found a ton of wooden stakes and bolts but no crossbow. It wasn’t until the end of the level where I had basically eliminated every possible location and then decided to backtrack outside the castle to see if I could find it out there. When you first get to the castle you go one of two ways through a bunch of ruins before reaching the door. I chose the left which happened to be the way in. The right path goes to the crossbow. After accessing the castle I completely forgot about anything outside. If I’m already in the castle, what reason do I have to back out and snoop around some more ruins? There’s also a critical melee weapon that you can’t win without located in the same area. If I had gone into the dungeon without finding that, I would have been screwed because there’s no way out of there.
Part of the problem is that I either think too much or I think opposed to what I’m supposed to. At one of the houses in town I found a cellar in the backyard. My thought was that there were survivors inside and I needed to get the door open. When you try to open it, Stranger says it’s locked and he can’t break it down with the axe. Then I think, what *can* break it down? I found a box of explosives right inside the house and stuck it in front of the door, which was at the bottom of some stairs going into the ground like a bunker. I spent quite a while trying to find an angle I could shoot it from without blowing myself up. There isn’t one. I took it to a boarded-up mine and tried it there. I survived the blast but nothing happened to the door. Flustered, I went to the church and was told there were kids in the cellar and that they’d only open with a special knock. After I saved them, one kid opens the mine for me. Well, what the hell? Why were the explosives there? It’s like they just put it there to confound me and waste my time.
Deep in the mine there are a bunch of chambers where you have to find various stones and get past simple traps. At least they would be simple if they didn’t usually require you to jump over something. Stranger jumps like a blind kangaroo on PCP. He jumps too far. He jumps crooked. He jumps twice? They’re in absolutely no position to make this into a platformer with these godawful controls.
Part III: Windy City Massacre
Monsters: Zombie Mobsters with Tommyguns (You heard me.)
This is where the shit hit’s the fan. You go to Chicago to stop Al Capone from continually raising his dead mobsters back to life as zombies. The entire city is plagued with these assholes. They’re on top of roofs and riding around in cars. They’re constantly shooting at you and there’s almost nowhere you can go where they can’t hit you. Going back to the camera angles, this is where it becomes absolutely crippling. The fixed camera system works well for enhancing horror; not so well for a fucking gun fight. Imagine that you’re playing Grand Theft Auto and you just pissed off about 30 triads and you can’t get off their turf. They respawn. They’re on top of every building and you can only actually see about two of them at a time because the rest are shooting at you from off screen and there’s nothing you can do about it. You have to run around the city lost, all the while being hit by bullets. It’s not fun at all. It’s just horribly annoying. And it only gets worse when you have to escort a slow-ass guy all the way across town.
At the end of the level you have to blow up the zombie factory and escape while it’s exploding around you. The explosions cut off your escape if you‘re one second too slow. If that wasn’t bad enough, dozens of new machinegun-wielding zombies suddenly just appear where there were none before. If you touch any fire at all, even the slightest, you die; because your trench coat is made of papier mache drenched in kerosene.
Part IV: The house on the Edge of Hell
Monsters: Everything
The title is slightly misleading. The house isn’t actually on the edge of hell. The house *is* hell. It makes Windy City Massacre look perfectly delightful. The pretense is that the owner of the house calls you there to deal with a manifestation of paranormal shit in his graveyard. You can kill the imps but the skeletons just come back. At least they’re slow. The first puzzle involves searching the monsters for stolen crypt keys. Supposedly there are three keys but I only found two. I opened two crypts and then had to find two crosses of certain shapes to put inside them. One looked like an Egyptian ankh. That one was easy to get because there’s only one in the whole yard. The other one was a generic Christian cross which is everywhere. I don’t know how long I spent trying to locate every single one, thoroughly checking them all and attempting to jump to ones near impossible to get to or just impossible to get to. It was a long time. After reading some extremely vague walkthroughs, I found it.
Not this one.
Not this one.
Not this one.
Not this one.
Not these.
Not this one.
It's actually this one. See it? Isn't it so obvious? They all look exactly the same! What difference does it make if I use this ugly cement cross or that ugly cement cross?!
After that, I was in no mood to go find a fucking key that probably landed somewhere on the ground in between two camera shots and underneath a bunch of dismembered imp flesh chunks. So I used the skeleton key cheat.
After some more retarded crap, you figure out that it was all an incredibly aggravating ruse to get you to drop by and then the guy knocks you out. You wake up in a torture chamber and then…
Hello Stranger. I want to play a game. How many monsters have you killed working for Spookhouse? A thousand? Ten-thousand? Did you ever stop to consider the baby orphan werewolves? Or think that maybe Al Capone was running a legitimate business? A zombie, no matter how brain dead, can still value life. You, however, only destroy life. You have two options: play the most terribly convoluted, confusing and unfair level ever designed or suicide. If you chose death, the device in the corner will twist your body in half in approximately ten minutes while grinding your face off with rusty forks. Make your choice.
So you’re in this guy’s huge mansion which consists of nothing but monsters and deathtraps. It’s actually a lot like Saw II or Cube. You go from room to room to see what horrible bullshit you have to face next. Probably about 90% of the traps are impossible to not get killed by the first time. And even after that you have to figure out the right path, or the correct switch, or the right combination. It’s always, step in the wrong place; you die. Press the wrong button; you die. Open the wrong door: you die. Wrong room: you die. Too slow; you die. Touch something; you die. You cough; you die. Do anything; you die. You’re constantly being electrocuted, shot, burned and drowned. You fall in pits, get attacked by shit flying out of the wall and things crushing you from the ceiling. It’s fucking ridiculous. You can’t go ten seconds without being impaled or getting assaulted with full frontal nudity.
How ‘bout some fireplay, bitch.
These aren’t the kind of traps that make you feel smart once you get past them. It’s nothing but endless trial and error drudgery. It really wears on your nerves after a while. All of your weapons are gone and after about an hour of nothing but melee battles with zombies, electrocution and hundreds of doors that don‘t lead anywhere in an overwhelmingly large house, I decided I shouldn’t have to play fair anymore and used the all guns/ammo cheat.
There is an overall series of puzzles you have to solve and keys you have to get to finally get to the guy responsible. You eventually meet another agent that was imprisoned in the house and you basically get him to kill him. He tells you meet him in the guy’s control room on the third floor. What a brilliant idea! Don’t you think if I knew where his fucking control room was, I would have already killed him? And telling me to go somewhere on the third floor is about as specific as telling me to meet you at 'a bar' in New Jersey. Anyway, you kill him and win. Then you get emotional and weepy from the shell shock.
The ending leads you to believe that there will be a sequel. It’s been ten years and there still hasn’t been one. Had this game been executed better, it would probably be in my top ten favorites. If only parts three and four never existed. If and when the sequel happens, I’m going to have to check it out.
