I love retro games, really! But I wasn't amused much about this game so many years ago and neither today, at almost 40. Somehow it's missing a lot of things that many other shooters had. Just... not right. For me at least.
No wonder this game went free. I am sorry because the atmosphere and the surroundings show that the devs worked hard on the game but it was all in vain. The thing about being the successor or other, much better games by the same people and the things that others mentioned ruin it all. Why do we have to go near to everything in order to see it? Why couldn't you guys just make it so it just plays as the previous games? A shame.
The graphics and such are okay, not good but... meh. But the physics, the wrecking... is just terrible. Huge step back from the first game. You can literally only damage the enemy cars if you collide with them head-on. Nothing else counts as real damage (and no credits for it either). Stick with the first one.
It's a nice little "visual novel" based on a Lovecraft short story. It has a nicely done visual with a very limited view and unfortunately a few bugs where you get stuck or suddenly your view gets thrown around in 180. 30m play time at max. My main issue is that while they took the time and effort to actually have voiceover, the acting is just hideous. There is literally no emotion in it, almost like being read by a text-to-speech engine. Where is the madness, the darkness and hopelessness from the voice acting? It is okay if it's not a game but a visual novel. It's okay if it literally has 30 minutes of play time. Fine. But if it has voice over, for the love of god, make that "actor" actually feel into the role! This ruined the whole experience - even though the surroundings were nicely done and planned.
There are genuine cool ideas in this game and since it's from '96 the full 3D rotation and stuff were kind of newish and awesome at the time. So all is great, right? No. In fact nothing is great with this game. So much wasted potential that I don't even want to write a list or create a proper review for this game as it doesn't deserve it. Nor the purchase (sorry!). So I will tell about the terrible voice acting (which is nice digitalized but terribly, truly terribly spoken by probably one of the devs) and the extreme pixel hunting gameplay where you have to literally sweep every single square millimeter in order to find stuff illogically hidden. The "puzzles" are also terrible. Not "Brain Busting Puzzles" but annoying, illogical obstacles that you have no idea how to resolve at first. The list could go on but I just don't want to.
I've played the previous game of the creators of CAYNE, and I really liked it. But this game was.... quite disappointing. STORY The story doesn't really make too much sense, I read ALL PDA-s, I speak fluent English (so that is not the problem that I didn't read them or didn't understand them) and I have to say that there are more holes on the story than actual story itself. Not to mention that the supposedly "big twist" for the end was obvious from the first minute. Also, even though the ending was obvious, at least that cutscene could have done properly, but basically you don't actually get to see. GAMEPLAY The interactions are stupid to say the least. Zero logics, very hard to play without a walkthrough as the items and interactions doesn't make much sense. The game is short, but they tried to make it longer by making you run around A LOT. Instead of that, they could have created actual content. OVERALL A huge disappointment after other games (even from this same dev!) because this game could have been so much more, there was so much potential! But no... Shame.
