Since I just finished Fear Effect, I guess this would be the best time to write the review! Well, I did not like this game very much at the beginning. The opening scene has a Chinese girl narrating the story and it is just awful! Why they start such a great game is so bad is beyond me. Then I was disappointed there was no kind of training, you are just thrown into the game. A little bit of getting use to the controls would have been nice. I shut the game off after a few minutes of playing and there it sat for a day. Then I decided to go back and give it one more try. Big Smile. Sure am glad I gave it a second chance. The story grabbed me and pulled me in more and more every cut scene. I just had to find out what was going on!
The game has you alternating between three main characters. They are all following the same story line, (to find some girl for 90 Million in cold and hard!), they just take different paths during the scenes. I.e. Hana will go through the front door while Deke takes the rear entrance. This game is basically a mixture of Metal Gear Solid, Resident evil, and some Dragon’s Lair thrown in! The puzzles are all logical and very fun. Only one of them gave me problems. Make sure you have a pen and pad ready, you will NEED it! The combat system is similar to the other games in this genre. You have guns and you shoot the bad guys! The only special move, is you are able to sneak up on enemies and get a quick kill. The AI on the enemies is horrible! You can be standing in front of one and he won’t see you sometimes! It didn’t really bother me though, I still enjoyed mowing them down.
The main way this game is different from Resident Evil is the use of Full Motion Video backgrounds. Everything in the world is moving. While this is a unique technology for this game, I don’t see it being used in the future. I am sure the PS2 and DC could easily render the backgrounds in real time. It is basically a way of making the 4.5 year old PSX look like it is doing more than it is. The downsides are that the game runs in letter-box mode, and the FMV needs to loop after about 3 seconds giving a very slight pause to the background visuals and sounds. I think they should have put the sounds outside of the FMV so at least they would not pause constantly. While this annoyed me a lot in the beginning, I got use to it after a while. In the latter scenes, the are just some amazing sights to behold!
While the game is a little short, it is well worth the $40 for 4 CDs of great gaming. Hey, if I finish a game, you know it’s got to be good. I have the attention span of a 3 year old!
-Scott
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