Boiling Point: Road To Hell

Boiling Point: Road To Hell (PC) review

Kieron Gillen

And that's the problem.

The reductionist argument tends to either over- or under-rate Boiling Point. Start listing its good moments and it sounds like one of the greatest games of all time. Start listing its failings, and it sounds like something that should be sharing a cell with Rise Of The Robots in the Great Crimes Against Gamerdom Prison. Understand that there is absolutely nothing wrong with either of the above arguments, and you'll hear people making them sincerely. Hell: you may even hear yourself making them, and if the person you were talking to was being honest, they'd admit to seeing your point.

Boiling Point's greatest strength is that it manages to keep an atmosphere and tone even despite all the bug-based hilarity that surrounds you. That's mostly down to the technology, which keeps everything in a single explorable context. As you head into the fog-covered areas, heading toward an unknown waypoint, there's a genuine sense of discovery, heightened by the fact that you know you could have gone there any time you wanted. When looking at the map and planning, what influences you are the constraints in the world rather than the constraints of the game. So, for example, where in System Shock 2 you would go almost anywhere on the level you're on rather than use the elevator to go down a floor to get something due to the loading times, here you only look at the distance you have to drive. Since you're thinking purely in terms of the game as an explorable environment rather than a theoretical space, it really seduces you. Even if another car has just crashed through a security barrier due to getting its braking distance wrong.

It also stresses that there's more to games than fun. There are other ways to enthral the gamer than the jocular laugh-a-minute approach. For example, the long drives across the countryside, with the relatively basic driving model, can't be considered that much fun in the standard sense, prove perversely enthralling (though when something goes wrong, you turn off road and you're swerving between tree-trunks to try and escape pursuit, it does hold its visceral charms). Yet again, it's an atmosphere thing. Having to go somewhere makes the destination more important, and increases your sense of it being a real place. It's the price you pay for immersion. It also helps that even in its Boiling Point incarnation, driving long distances down roads is more interesting than walking (as in Morrowind) or flying them (as in Elite). Because, in driving, each second is at least a low-level test of skill, instead of just heading in a straight line and holding a button.

Most importantly, when it's good it's genuinely great. In terms of both beautiful gaming moments and teeth-gnashing pain, you'll have more mini-narratives from Boiling Point than any half-a-dozen recent blockbusters. It's also rife with throwaway ideas. To choose my favourite example, when you're spotted by a guard you have half a second to press F1. If you manage it, you'll cough out an excuse, claiming that you're only here to deliver a parcel. And there's a chance of it working. Madness. Inspired madness. The game's so feature-rich that you get the feeling Deep Shadows are the sorts of people who'd spend time working on a theme tune for the game to play during install rather than any one of the assorted bugs. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered if they were given another six months to polish it off, as they'd have just used the time to add some kind of bread-baking feature or a fully functional kazoo.

However, yes, it's not finished, and that does impact your enjoyment. Putting aside the bugs, there are sections where the lack of polish in terms of missions is all too clear. Even things like the script, which is painful in almost being well-written. There are jokes aplenty, and with a decent rewriting they could have actually worked well, instead of seeming a little babelfished. Despite the lack of polish, nothing actually stops you playing.

Put it like this: This is probably one of the most enjoyable piece of early-Beta code that I've ever played. You want to damn Atari for releasing it like this. However, you also want to hail them for spending money on something of Boiling Point's ambition rather than the safe option. After all, if this sells nothing, the lesson publishers will learn won't be "Don't release unfinished games" but "Don't invest in ambitious ones".

That said, none of those ideological musings should really impinge on your buying decisions. All that matters is whether you're going to enjoy it enough to be worth the money. Hopefully, by looking at yourself and understanding your relative need for a freeform action-adventure game versus your willingness to put up with a lot of unnecessary crap, you'll now know whether this most bemusing of games is for you.

Me? Despite everything, I like it a lot. When talking to someone about this, he asked how can you give something this broken a fairly decent mark? Well, if you still enjoy it.