Points of Review!

Apocalyptica (PC)

by Jonathan Friery

A problem for me comes about when I find myself addicted to a game that just completely frustrates me on some fundamental level. I've run into this problem in Apocalyptica. Now, I tried the demo when it was released recently. On my Radeon 9800 Pro and Barton 3200+, the game was a slideshow at a decent resolution (1024x768 for most games shouldn't kill off my system). Quite frankly, Apocalyptica was a joke for me. I checked out the website, laughed at the silly weapons (though the idea of the game is nifty, there's something about a chainsaw sword labeled 'the hand of god' that just makes me giggle) and thought nothing of the game since I am from the USA, and it'll never come over here. A couple of days ago, my friend "acquired" the game and left it out in the open. He never touched it, so after a day I installed, and fired it up. The options are almost nonexistent aside from the graphics, switching the controls is something of a hassle, and there's no set difficulty.

So, aside from leaving everything on high, realising I had to bind a control to a key I didn't want to use, then switch another control to the key I wanted to use but was bound before, I just went for it. I picked for myself Samariel of the Seraph character set. Apparently from his stats, he's slow and sucks at melee and using guns, but he has spells. A movie detailed the story (basically, my character was a clone of a Saint, and he's part of the mission to stop an evil archdemon of Neo-Satan's army. Tame stuff.), the load screen shows the objectives with pictures, and while I loaded out my character and chose which nun I wanted to fight alongside me, I was treated to a rehash of the objectives. That part you can skip. The first level, coincidentally the demo level, actually ran at a decent rate. I had read previously that this was Quake 3 technology used in the game, and I couldn't believe it. The game had highly detailed textures, flags moving in the background, realistic renderings of rocks, light trails, etc. Holy freaking eye candy. This is something to spaz over, but much like Halo for the PC, indoor parts still had that annoying framerate problem the demo had. The sound's encompassing, and I couldn't find fault with it on my nForce2 onboard Soundstorm, yet it didn't leave the "oomph" impression on me that the graphics did.

And the gameplay... absolutely buggy, absolutely addicting. The game is team-based at its core. You have upwards of three "sidekicks" who are there to support you. This has been done before. In fact, I'd wager that they took the AI directly from an old game because how horrid it is in this game just makes me want to rip hair out of my head. On the levels where they just back up the character one plays, I forgave them all for being caught on stairways, randomly jumping off cliffs, shooting guns at you (no friendly fire, hooray). Just that on the levels with timers that their help guarantees victory, the AI being horrible starts to irritate me. For example, one level had me and my team versus the evil team in order to set switches to allow a door to open. There are five of these switches, and they take about ten seconds to convert them to my team, or if an enemy is on one, to theirs. On that level, an enemy would run past one of my team-members, who would stop for a second, then chase after the enemy, eventually catching up when they got to a switch, only to get stuck on a wall and die. The enemy never initiated fighting on that level. My team-mates never used ranged weapons. And yet I love this game. It's a beat-'em-up to the core with much in the line of old 80's games that I keep trudging through it, taking on the task of killing every enemy just so I'll advance to the next level, much as I would pour a few dollars into Street Fighter II in the arcades just to beat it a few times. Without the flaws, Konami would have had a surefire hit over here in the States. With them, I still love the game, but maybe you European types will be more tolerable of it.