This game could have been something special given the unusual dieselpunk aesthetic, but unfortunately everything about it other than the interesting mech designs is half baked and amateurish. From the horrible grating voice acting to the cabbage grade AI and baffling gameplay decisions and sluggish pacing, it just feels like a sort of decent beta version of some other unfinished game. What really made me refund though is the woeful optimisation and failure to start/black screen problems. A shame.
Running via dosbox, the visuals are blurry, the controls are twitchy and the audio is gratingly awful. I had this game on the ST and loved it, but the PC version is awful. Better to find an emulator and run via that for your nostalgia fix. On the plus side, it does run ok in windows 10 thanks to dosbox.
This review may contain spoilers. When this game first came out in 1994 it was groundbreaking and I had never seen anything like it before. FMV mixed with a point and click adventure with full 3d environments? Sign me up. Playing it today and taking off the nostalgia goggles has shown me that, while still a fantastic game, it is deeply flawed. The good: The world the game represents is a fun post world war 3 san francisco populated by wacky and likeable characters. The FMV, while cheesy also has a similar charm and is for the most part about as well acted as FMV of that era could be. The storyline is OK and the puzzles are for the most part logically solvable. The bad: The controls. Oh dear. Awkward and hard to control, like brain surgery wearing boxing gloves, but this game was from a time before 3d movement had been perfected. Some of the puzzles were stupid and require trial and error, such as the ludicrous spider ball cup game and the stasis pod, and you can die just walking through the wrong door. Pixel hunting. Some critical objects are difficult to spot and it feels deeply unfair that you are dead ended because you missed picking up a 2d single pixel wide virtually invisible watch off a mantlepiece, or a slightly different coloured rock out of a wall. These are just two examples, but the game is full of them. Overall though, it is still worth playing if yoiu can get beyond the flaws.
