Psychotoxic
It doesn’t get much worse than this.
Tags: Psychotoxic Categories: PC Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Ludwig on May 2nd, 2005
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Psychotoxic (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
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Playing Psychotoxic is an immensely disturbing experience, one that wreaks havoc with your psyche and haunts your nightmares forever. Developed by a company called Nuclear Vision, it seems only appropriate that playing this first-person shooter is akin to witnessing unmitigated nuclear catastrophe unfold before your very eyes. It’s an uncomfortable and unforgettable sight, to be sure. A noxious mushroom cloud looms over a bustling metropolis, while children panic and writhe in pain as their faces melt in the wake of radioactive annihilation. Even more unsettling is the fact that those very same children are having a great deal more fun than someone experiencing this well-meaning, but disastrously executed game.
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Placing you in the preposterously tight pants of Angie Prophet, the story sees you running around a gritty future in an attempt to foil the plans of the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, a rather disagreeable fellow who’s keen on sending the world careening into anarchy. Accompanied by an annoying artificial intelligence called Max (represented by a creepy pair of green lips), Angie discovers that only through her strange powers can she save the world from untold peril. From the magically gifted heroine to the post-apocalyptic future, no cliché or contrivance is spared to bring you this epic tale of good vs. evil vs. rubbish. The cutscenes carrying the paper-thin plot forward are meant to create an ambience of fear and oppression, but thanks to the offensively inept voice acting and ham-fisted animation, they merely come across as embarrassingly tragic.
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The gameplay suffers a similar fate, though perhaps one should celebrate the few things it does manage to accomplish. You do, in fact, shoot things from a first-person perspective. I hesitate to use the word “enemy” here, as that would indicate some sort of threat to the existence of the player. The armies of generic goons you’ll face during the course of the game pose little challenge, as the artificial intelligence that governs their movements is broken at a very fundamental level. When they’re not standing right in front of you and shooting, they’re getting stuck behind furniture, running headlong into walls or colliding with their partners in stupidity. It would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic.
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Breaking pace from the repetitive and relentless mowing down of bad guys, you’ll frequently be called upon to find colored keycards to unlock certain doors. Now, “find the blue key” gameplay might be considered by some to be an homage to Doom, but only in the way that clubbing random people over the head is considered an homage to cavemen. It’s a silly relic of the genre, reflecting lazy level design and breaking down any sense of believability the game has strived to create. It’s especially frustrating considering that the environments are littered with similar looking doors, some of which can be blasted apart and some which can’t. You’ll frequently find yourself running in circles, simply because you didn’t notice a breakable door or a keycard lying on top of an obscure bookcase. The on-screen mission goals don’t exactly help either, since they’re usually misspelled and unintelligible. At one point, I was asked to “Tunnel the building” in order to complete the level. And let’s not even discuss the unwanted platforming segments.
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Thanks to Angie’s ability to enter people’s dreams, the game incorporates a couple of creatively wacky levels, offering brief flashes of what could have been a much better game. Unfortunately, the time spent in a cartoon world populated by homicidal bunnies and the trip to a Hammer-esque town of werewolves (complete with film grain rolling off the screen) is far too brief and is of little consolation when compared to all the other issues you have to put up with first. Seeing what Psychotoxic might have been capable of merely compounds its problems and further emphasizes the appallingly low level of quality. We’re talking you just threw your copy of the game down a mineshaft low.
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Psychotoxic’s chaotic physics system is equally shoddy and frequently sets bizarre behavior in motion. Gently nudging a chair just might send it flying off into the stratosphere and walking across a gun lying on the floor initiates a strange sliding motion as if you were wearing roller-skates. It’s merely a tacked on technical trick that fails to add anything of worth to a game that is already a ridiculous circus of rampant errors. You’ll get stuck in doorways. Angie’s arms will sometimes get left behind, floating in mid-air after you’ve moved forward. Loading a saved game can trigger a deadly fall through the level’s floor. Using a fixed gun turret will cause it to disappear and lock you and your currently equipped weapon in place. And of course, there are plain ‘ole crashes to the desktop lovingly sprinkled throughout.
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When you’re not busy seeing red, you’re seeing a dated and unremarkable graphics engine. Psychotoxic’s graphics may not be the most important factor to consider here, but as the primary conduit of communication between the game and the player, it needs to be effective, especially given the visual powerhouses in the FPS genre. Textures are blurry and unattractive, lighting is dull and level geometry is basic at best. The animation is dreadful, with clunky enemy movements making it seem as if they’re all gun-toting marionettes attached to invisible strings. Shooting these guys results in a comical explosion of red mush, something which is nearly as realistic as the giant bullet decals on the walls that are the same no matter which gun you use. But then, whacking the wall with a Tonfa also results in an expansive bullet hole appearing. Yeah.
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Psychotoxic’s range of weapons is reasonably varied but consistently underpowered. This isn’t too great of an issue until you realize that you can only carry five weapons at any one time, two of which are the mandatory and utterly useless Tonfa and Tazer gun. So, that leaves us with an artificially imposed limit of three guns. Unlike Halo or Call of Duty, the gameplay isn’t structured around this gimmick – this a straightforward, guns blazing shooter. Restricting your offensive capabilities is without point or merit and serves only to introduce a worthless gun-juggling contrivance in the false hope of adding a tactical element to the game. Angie can also make use of a few powers every now and then, but surely by now everybody realizes that slowing down time is old hat. Regardless, the lack of AI means that there’s not much benefit to using these abilities anyway.
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This review reads like a shopping list for the Bad Game Design supermarket, with a brief look further down revealing that the game features awful sound and absolutely no multiplayer whatsoever. Despite a few barely noticeable flashes of creative level design, Psychotoxic offers nothing but technical anomalies, laughable gameplay and a hackneyed plot. Finding anything good about the game is a task verging on the impossible, akin to setting out on an archeological dig, equipped with nothing but a paperclip and a very ornate hat. Even if you do manage to find some ancient fossils, nobody will care. If that analogy doesn’t cover it, here’s a more direct comparison: Setting yourself on fire and then diving into a pool of broken glass is more fun than playing this absolute disaster of a game.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ Nearly undetectable flashes of creative level design here and there. + You do, in fact, shoot things from a first-person perspective. |
2.5 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- Worthless storyline. - Atrocious voice acting. - Hilariously incompetent AI. - “Find the blue key” gameplay. - Unintelligible mission goals. - Chaotic physics system. - Bugs, glitches and technical snafus, oh my! - Dated and unremarkable graphics. - Artificially imposed carry limit on the already underpowered weapons. - Awful sound. - No multiplayer whatsoever. - Are you still reading this? |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Avoid this game like you would a deranged Ebola salesman. | |
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Tags: Psychotoxic
Posted by Ludwig on May 2nd, 2005 and is filed under PC Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
[...] can enter people’s dreams and do battle with their subconscious. Our own Ludwig Kietzmann, in a previous life, wrote, “Setting yourself on fire and then diving into a pool of broken glass is more fun than [...]
[...] can enter people’s dreams and do battle with their subconscious. Our own Ludwig Kietzmann, in a previous life, wrote, “Setting yourself on fire and then diving into a pool of broken glass is more fun than [...]
[...] who can enter people’s dreams and do battle with their subconscious. Our own Ludwig Kietzmann, in a previous life, wrote, “Setting yourself on fire and then diving into a pool of broken glass is more fun than playing [...]
[...] who can enter people’s dreams and do battle with their subconscious. Our own Ludwig Kietzmann, in a previous life, wrote, “Setting yourself on fire and then diving into a pool of broken glass is more fun than playing [...]
[...] who can enter people’s dreams and do battle with their subconscious. Our own Ludwig Kietzmann, in a previous life, wrote, “Setting yourself on fire and then diving into a pool of broken glass is more fun than playing [...]
[...] who can enter people’s dreams and do battle with their subconscious. Our own Ludwig Kietzmann, in a previous life, wrote, “Setting yourself on fire and then diving into a pool of broken glass is more fun than playing [...]
[...] who can enter people’s dreams and do battle with their subconscious. Our own Ludwig Kietzmann, in a previous life, wrote, “Setting yourself on fire and then diving into a pool of broken glass is more fun than playing [...]
[...] who can enter people’s dreams and do battle with their subconscious. Our own Ludwig Kietzmann, in a previous life, wrote, “Setting yourself on fire and then diving into a pool of broken glass is more fun than playing [...]
[...] can enter people’s dreams and do battle with their subconscious. Our own Ludwig Kietzmann, in a previous life, wrote, “Setting yourself on fire and then diving into a pool of broken glass is more fun than [...]
[...] can enter people’s dreams and do battle with their subconscious. Our own Ludwig Kietzmann, in a previous life, wrote, “Setting yourself on fire and then diving into a pool of broken glass is more fun than [...]