|
|
|
||||
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
Oh.
I'm like scared and stuff. Umm. Eeek.
Review by Dave "!FT!Marauder" Kratky. July 22.2001
Gah. Doncha just HATE console ports? I do. (This is going to be a really short review guys.) Let me get something off my chest right away. I hate consoles. The vast majority of the games for them suck ass. I'm also not a huge fan of horror shooters. I usually don't find them horrifying. This one is no different. (I hated Resident Evil as well.)
I feel kinda guilty, cause I never did play any of the original Alone In The Dark games, and they're classics. (Or so I've been told.) After playing this one, I'm not really all that thrilled. If you want a good horror/survival game, go pick yourself up Clive Barker's Undying. This might actually not be a bad game, if it wasn't for Brother Clive showing me his little game a few months ago. The story even sounds the same. A forbidding mansion, a family possessed by evil. A maniacal older brother, an island with a dark secret. Monsters and dark powers everywhere. You with a big bloody gun to try and put a stop to the madness that has been unleashed by the foolish. Pictures that look different with the lights off. The similarity between the two games ends there. One thing that does set this game apart is the fact that you have 2 characters interacting with one another throughout the game, in person and via their radios. Edward Carnby and Aline Cedrac come to Shadow Island for different reasons. Aline is there to translate some old Indian tablets. Carnby is there to find out who murdered his best friend and kill them. Unlike you and your buddy Superfly, your two protagonists get separated continually after seeing each other for a few seconds. Upon crashing on the island, the adventure begins and you pick your main character. Anyhows, here's the goods: Graphics Engine & Sound Not bad atall for a console port. The areas are obviously all pre-painted pics you're walking around in, much like the aforementioned Resident Evil. It's low res, but looks decent as you can see from the below screenies. The rain looks nice, and the lightening effects in the clouds and distance looks very cool.
Some cutscenes are in the game engine, some are rendered and... Ummm..... They're OK I guess. They give you the story and... well, bad voice acting. Especially from Aline. "Oh Carnby, I'm scared. The big bad monsters are here. I'm scared. I'm really scared. I'm all goosebumpy and my low cut shirt is chaffing. Did I mention I'm scared?" From the cut scenes we get the idea she's scared. But as soon as the two characters meet up she's off again like the valiant monster snack she is. Gah. Sounds are pretty well done, with realistic sounding lightening and screams.... Lots of screams. :) The monster noises are creepy. The music however does tend to get a little repetitive if you end up getting stuck in the same place for a few minutes.
Weapons All we need here is a chainsaw, and Ash would feel right at home.
The world/Puzzles This sorta relates to the graphics section of the review. Areas are detailed and realistic looking. (Other than the artists seem to have a thing for chains everywhere. :) The puzzles are a pain in the ass. I'm not a big puzzle guy either, and when you have to push statues in front of mirrors to reveal the combination to unlock a painting upstairs to get a key to a door elsewhere, or to combine a flashlight with a blue lens so that I can follow a trail of blood, I've had too much. Most of the puzzles in AITD4 are of the "fiddle with things until you see the cutscene" or "Find the red key to open the blue door" variety.
AI/Monsters I have to give the Darkworks guys this: Some of their monsters are pretty damned cool looking. Interestingly I only ran into 2 monsters I'd really consider bosses. I expected more. Many of them can be killed with a huge number of bullets in the right place, others just run away from your flashlight, or vanish when you turn the lights on.
Urk. I'm not a fan of the fixed camera, walk around the scene type game. Resident Evil did it, and I've played a few others like Crusader: No Remorse that have a similar thing going on. I find the fact that the direction your character is facing in can change when you go from one part of the room to another, as the scene changes. Maybe it's just me, but I find it quite disorienting and when you're fighting monsters it can sometimes be quite frustrating.
The map is something you'll be consulting constantly in this particular game. Watch for dead ends. They're inevitably little treasure troves once you kill whatever's waiting in ambush for you.
Manual Sucks ass.
The manual for AITD4 has 4 pages of usefull information. Basically
it gives you the controls and that's about it. You can tell it's
a console port when they put "LEFT MOUSE CLICK" in quotes.
:) They give you a very brief and lame little background story about
the two characters. Multiplayer None.
• Stupid console ports with their stupid limited saves.
• This just in from the Infogrames support site: "If you are using a fast machine such as a Pentium 233 or faster, you may need to turn down video hardware acceleration." The game needs a PII-400 and this is in their troubleshooting section. These people suck. :) (Jeze I'm picky eh?) • Music tends to get a little repetitive. • Camera switching around can be disorienting.
AITD4's console origins are painfully obvious from the get go. If you like these sort of games, and are a console type of guy, you might enjoy it. The graphics are pretty and detailed, and it does offer the occasional jolt of action. But........................... With games like Half Life and Undying out there for competition in the same general genre it's not a great PC game. (Go get Undying if you haven't already. Trust me.) If you MUST get this one, wait for the price to come down.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
