Joint statement from Voidpoint and 3D Realms: "We’ve caused a recent controversy suggesting Ion Fury game content was to be censored. We will absolutely NOT be censoring Ion Fury or any of our other games, now or in the future, including but not limited to by removing gags such as gaming’s most controversial facial wash. We do not support censorship of creative works of any kind and regret our initial decision to alter a sprite in the game instead of trusting our instincts. 3D Realms and Voidpoint stand together on this matter. Last but not least, please respect our need to keep our community forums clean from hateful messages, spam, or off-topic threads. We recognize our mistake and have received your message loud and clear!" So stop whining and enough with the review bombing! The game is awesome, and deserves a place among the best old-school shooters. Rate the game for what it is, not for some bullshit politics surrounding it!
(Attention! To make the game at least remotely playable, you HAVE TO install the 1.3 community patch. It adds widescreen support, unlimited saves, the ability to play without your sidekicks, and a plethora of other fixes. A must-have!) Daikatana is a game everyone likes to throw crap at, and let's be completely honest here, for very good reasons. But underneath the turd-mountain of technical issues, there is a hidden gem lying. To give credit, where credit is due, the game is very ambitious, and it's variety is really impressive. There are four chapters, and all of them have different environments, enemies and weapons. The first one is 25th century Japan, which is... horrendous. It has awful level design with narrow corridors, annoying enemies and counterproductive weaponry. Yes, the first chapter of the game is far the worst of all, so I'm not surprised that most people shut down the game after a few levels. But if you manage to suffer through that, the next one is ancient Greece, which is surprisingly good - I had quite a lot of fun with it. It's like a completely different game - much more opened up areas, better level design and great weapons. It reminds me of Unreal - of course that game is far superior in every aspect. The next one is medieval Norway, which is not bad either with it's snow-covered villages and lava-filled caverns. The weapons are useful too (except for that "satan-staff", which is utterly pointless). The last one is 21th century San Fransisco, which is OK, a little worse than the previous two. Here you can blast through your enemies with traditional FPS weaponry, like pistols, shotguns, a chaingun or a laser cannon. This is a story-driven FPS game, so that means you have to sit through a lot of awkwardly scripted and lame cutscenes, which drag on far too long, and witness the characters' still faces during conversations (this was 2 years after Half-life, which already managed to achieve moving mouths). Anyway, the story involves time travelling, paradoxes and betrayal. It's quite cliché and predictable, but acceptable for this kind of game. Daikatana uses the Quake 2 engine, which gets the job done, but nothing too impressive. The environments and effects look good for the time, but the character models are kinda bad, and the animations are very weak. The game's "advanced AI" is the real deal - it sucks. Oh god. The enemies are blind, deaf and braindead, and sometimes they doesn't even shoot, just stand in one place and stare at you. If they move, they get stuck in corners, doors and stairs. Your companions are no better either. They are always blocking you, and their pathfinding is so dreadful, that they always manage to stuck somewhere (even in an open corridor), so you have to babysit them all the time. They blindly run towards enemies to get murdered, and get crushed by elevators or doors. They are your real enemies in this game - they do nothing, but hinder your progress. Disabling them is highly recommended. There are some RPG elements in the game, which means you can upgrade your properties like Power or Attack speed. I like the idea, but they are not that significant, and the Speed and Acro upgrades are pretty much useless. If you kill with the Daikatana, it absorbs the XP, and the sword itself gets more and more powerful, which is great. So this game is a very mixed bag, but I'd say give it a try! It's a very ambitious concept of an FPS/RPG hybrid with cooperative gameplay, but the technical issues prevented it from being a great classic. It's disappointing, yes, but not nearly as bad, as everyone likes to claim.
