I wanted to like this game. I really did. I tried to see past all the negative aspects to the true heart of the game, the original intent of the developers, but alas, I could not.

I read a review of this in the sunday times games column – a place from which I have gleaned some honest and accurate game reviews in the past. It got a good review. However, upon playing this festering turd pile, I can safely say the person who wrote that review NEVER PLAYED THE GAME. Whoever you are, you should be sacked.

Now, before I go any further, let me outline the good points of this game, for there are some.
1) At 25 Square Kilometers, its got to be one of the biggest game areas I’ve ever played in.
2) You can search the bodies of people you kill for stuff, instead of it just floating beside them. I Like that.
3) When your car ditches in a river, you have to manually get out, and swim to the surface, rather than being popped out the side door like a zit.

That concludes the positive portion of the review. Do not read on if:
a) you have already bought the game at some expense
b) you’re an idiot, and intend to buy it regardless of what people tell you.

Let’s start balancing those positive points.

1) 25 square kilometers is an awful distance for a game that sucks this much. One of the first mission involves driving to a prison, which takes TEN BLOODY MINUTES, assuming you go the right way first time which is difficult since the map is rubbish and the compass doesn’t help much. This is also assuming you don’t jam your truck between two trees and get permanently stuck, which can also happen.

2) You CAN search the bodies of dead people, but there are about five generic people in the whole town, and they only have three things each. A gun, ammo for that gun, and a bottle of tequila. Yes, its a horrible stereotype, but its in there. Also, people still shoot at you while you search, which is needlessly complex, and involves dragging and dropping items from the corpse’s inventory, then clicking a ‘confirm’ popup for each item you select, then an overall ‘confirm’ popup. I guess this would be useful if you tend to accidentally click on corpses, and accidentally click and drag their tequila into your inventory and then realise that you really really wish you were never carrying that bottle of tequila to begin with, and don’t want to just drop it on the street lest some troubled teen pick it up. However, when someones firing an Ak-47 at you, and your trying to grab ammunition for your empty revolver from a street corpse, and the inventory system keeps asking you are you completely certain that you want to take these bullets and put them in your pocket, its as helpful as a kick in the nads.

3) If and when your car ditches in the river, you might aswell be on land, because its pretty much the same scenery. It’s very difficult to tell you’re actually underwater.

Now. Negative things in general. The first impressions.

The very first thing that hits you is the dreadful loading times. It takes two minutes to load the menu (yes the MENU) on my machine, an athlon64 3400+, with 1gb of ram and an x800XL card in the slot. Then, once you click on ’start new game’, it takes another minute or two to load the game. So what the hell is it loading the first time? Its a complete mystery.

Next there’s a stupid cutscene showing the set up, Saul Meyers daughter being kidnapped. Basically, she runs down a corridor with enormous boobs (apparently made from wood since they don’t bounce), and then saul meyers gets a phone call, frowns at the camera and his head explodes. I laughed at least halfway through the two minute load bar which followed. then I realised the joke was on me.

You land, after an in-game cutscene that’s somewhat better than the rendered bird droppings at the beginning. The textured model actually looks like the star Arnold Vosloo (the bad guy from the mummy), and the voice-over sounds half decent. Although subtitles do pop-up and tick you off, and the only way to disable them involves skipping the whole cutscene anyway.

Then you take over – and someone else must’ve stepped in to do the rest of the voice acting because your character suddenly goes from sounding like a hard edged mercenary to a squeaky computer programmer. When you run, your view jumps up and down like the original doom. Not a good thing in this day and age.

You’ll notice, even on a high end machine, that the game is a bit stuttery. But try to turn down the graphic settings and you’ll find about 20 different texture honing settings, and two different resolutions. Yes Two. 1024×768x32, or 800×600x16.

The bustling town in which you reside, has two cars, and about 11 people, despite being bigger than the entire blood gulch map from Halo. People on the street talk at an inaudible level, unless you stand right next to them. And there are only about five people types. A tough guy, a guy in a sombrero, and old woman, a guy with a suitcase, and a midget.

The control system is the most counter-intuitive piece of bollocks I’ve had to use in years. I think typing DOS commands would have been easier. To converse with someone, you right-click on them. Then you have to use the F1-F8 keys to choose dialogue options, and hit escape when you’re finished talking. Also, you can’t move when you talk.

Cars are even worse. You click on a car or press enter when beside it to use it. It immediately switches to the inside view, and if there was a view change key, I couldn’t find it. I tried all the standards – v, c, F1, F2, 1,2,3,4 the numpad. Nothing worked. Why did I want to change views? I could only see directly ahead. Because the Mouse controls the steering aswell as the A & D and arrow keys. So you can’t look behind, or to your left or right.

But before I even got a car, I was sent to find a gun shop. I walked for what felt like an hour, and found the gun shop, and bought some guns, one of which used a type of ammo you couldn’t buy. When I shot at people it felt like I was pointing a stapler at them. Not to mention that the loading screen seemed to advertise the availability of a Steyr TMP, but when you go to the gun shop, and select the steyr TMP icon, it gives you some sort of a cross between an uzi and a mac-10.

The only thing I cannot fault with this game is the title. Boiling Point : The Road To Hell, suits this game as a title on so many levels. It’s interesting to time yourself and see how long you can play along with the stupid ‘talk to this guy, go over there’ missions before reaching boiling point, and just killing everyone in sight.

It astonishes me that a game like this can make it through every level of QA testing of a company, no matter how bad they are, and still be released. Its just shocking. Aside from all the drawbacks and shortcomings of the design, graphics, sound, control system etc., there are loads of very obvious bugs. The game is set in the fictional country of Realia, but there are numerous lines of dialogue mentioning that you’re in Bolivia. The sound regularly cuts out, leaving you in a completely silent town. You can’t draw a weapon indoors, even if people are standing in front of you, firing at you. You sometimes get stuck at the edge of the footpath, and you have to hit the jump key which propels you a good six feet into the air, in order to overcome this behemoth 2cm obstacle. I met a guy in the town square who’s briefcase floated beside his head as he walked. A CIA operative told me not to shoot, while intently pointing an invisible gun at me.

It really is amazing. I know I have a tendency to bash games’ shortcomings, but in this case, I am literally taken aback by how bad this game is, how many people failed to do their jobs for it to be this bad, and furthermore that it could actually manage to get a good review in an otherwise reputable games column. The games industry, press included, is in a sorry state if this heap of shit can be produced, released and reviewed and on its way to the consumer without so much as a head scratch.

So whatever you do, avoid Boiling Point : The Road To Hell like the plague. It’s unplayably bad and filled with bugs. As the great Jay Sherman would say, It STINKS!

Tags: games

Well I’ve been away a while, thats true, but it doesn’t mean i haven’t been keepin up to date with the games biz! Here’s the ’scoop’ if you will.

Internationally, the PS3 is still taking a nose-dive into a shit mountain. Even Sony have admitted that the demand for the PS3 has dwindled. and if Sony are saying that, you know there’s something wrong. Europe still waits for a release date, and here in ireland we have the glorious honour of a price increase of €30 on everyone else in europe (thanks to our stupid tax system – no wonder everythings so fucking expensive here). Still, I can’t really see it being a problem. Not one person I know is waiting to buy one – they’ve all seen the writing on the wall. Most of those who were halfways interested have gone for a 360 or Wii. I think some of them might even have held out for the PS3 if all of europe hadn’t been bypassed. Tragic.

Crysis is looking more and more gorgeous by the day. We’ve had a dose of new videos. It looks fantastic. But besides all the fantastic graphics and awesome looking gameplay, the best part is reading the interviews with Crytek, practically apolgising for FarCry, saying that this time round they have the luxury of spending more time “refining” the multiplayer aspect. I still think FarCry is one of the best MP games out there for LAN parties. If you don’t believe me, give it a whirl. You won’t be disappointed.

Of course, the big big news this month is the Duke Nukem Forever screenshot. I’ve spent the last two weeks on the forums, eating up every post I could on the subject while people dissected a 200×150 pixel screenshot of the new duke, which was used as part of a gamasutra recruitment ad for 3d-Realms. The shot has been confirmed as a real, in game shot of duke, so its pretty exciting stuff. Everyone is speculating on release dates once more, even though the forums have very strict rules against such speculation. However, out here on the wild wild net, the forum mods do not rule, so I can speculate all I like! I firmly believe we’ll be playing it before the end of this year, possibly even by the summer

anyway, thats all I got for this week/month/season, hopefully i’ll be posting more regularly from now on!

Tags: games