After playing Blood & FEAR, I was excited to see what else was in Monolith's back catalog. The mecha concept is pretty unique, but ultimately shallow - all it really means is some levels play with a different set of weapons & some environmental details are scaled down (tiny cars, etc) Especially disappointing is the AI, which is very passive and poses no real challenge. The only real threat is from enemies placed in corners next to entryways who shoot you in the back as soon as you enter the room. It's made worse by the baffling critical hit system - sometimes you'll shoot an enemy and you'll randomly do more damage to them. Unfortunately, enemies can do this to you to, often 1-shotting you before you can do anything about it. Level design is pretty weak too, as if they forgot to fully populate the levels with items or secrets, and they're over within minutes. I ended up beating the game within 5 hours. Audiovisually, it's decent for the era. Graphics are comparable to the Quake 2 engine, and the soundtrack has a nice futuristic feel. The story tries to evoke an anime but is totally nonsensical. Mostly it's used for a vehicle for really bad jokes. Ultimately, there's way better games out there, both from Monolith and from the era.
Excellent simulator that manages to scratch the same addictive itch as in RollerCoaster Tycoon; that sensation of building a hospital from a tiny set of rooms to a thriving, several-hundred-thousand dollar mega-hospital is something few sims are able to achieve. The game is just complex enough to be rewarding and to always give you something to do or think about, but rarely overwhelming. The experience, however, is marred by some serious problems that become especially frustrating in late game: - Bugs, bugs, bugs; most of the time the only way to solve them is to load an earlier save. At one point, a consultant-grade surgeon disappeared into a limbo outside of the boundaries of the map somehow and I couldn't pick him up. If you send someone to the autopsy room from the GP's Office, the door will suddenly disappear, rendering the room unusable. - Horrific pathfinding / AI. Remember how bad handymen were in RCT? Well, they've got nothing on these guys, who will happily walk through entire fields of vomit & trash. Late-game requires you to micromanage armies of handymen and surgeons, who have a strange habit of going walkabout when emergency queues are forming at the Operating Rooms. - The epidemic mechanic makes no sense and seems totally random - sometimes, you'll instantly run out of time to inoculate people even when no one has gone home; sometimes, you'll have a massive epidemic and the health inspector won't even notice it; sometimes, your health inspector will detect an infected patient clear on the other side of the map. Sometimes, it makes you want to hurl your computer out of a window. In summary, you'll more than get your money's worth from this by the time you start to get annoyed. I'd recommend playing RollerCoaster Tycoon first before tackling this. I should also note there's an open-source implementation called CorsixTH that might fix some of the bugs, but I never got a chance to try it out.
Bug #1: Mouse sensitivity is unusably high by default; I had to edit a registry setting & set the DPI on my mouse way low to get usable aiming Bug #2: Recurring glitch keeps happening where certain in-game characters do not spawn at all; if they are a hostage or mission-critical target, you get to start all over! This is especially bad in mission #5, where even my team members started disappearing. There's a workaround for this by altering the victory conditions, but at that point all the fun had been drained from the game for me. I Bug #3: Numerous texture rendering problems in-game; certain walls (usually stuff covered in vines) are intermittently transparent. Bug #4: Not really a problem with the game itself, but the Eagle Watch expansion is not included (probably because the installer for it is broken on modern Windows versions) I award two stars because I did get several hours of enjoyment out of it, but after a while the frustration outweighed the fun. I'd say someone who wants a tactical shooting experience is better off picking up the SWAT games, the releases of which can't be buggier than this.
-Pros: *Nice moody atmosphere, aided by a great soundtrack *Fun, well-designed puzzles. Absolutely no pixel hunts here *Unique combat mechanic *Full-voice acting -Cons: *Your character moves like molasses, but that's typical of the genre. *One dialog tree seems to take trial-and-error to progress through
