I've returned to this game a bunch of times over the years since I got it in '99 or whatever, and I've always considered it oddly compelling despite its many, many problems. This time, though, I think I've finally been cured of that. It is and always has been utter trash.
If you're not familiar with this thing, it was meant to be a kind of prestige Jurassic Park version of HALF-LIFE - a totally immersive unbroken first-person journey through the abandoned ruins of that second island from The Lost World. But rather than employing traditional FPS mechanics to fulfill that assignment, the vision for the gameplay was complete interactivity with the environment using realistic real-time physics. Of course, that's something that we totally take for granted now, but it was more or less unheard of at the time of this game's development, and wouldn't really be a mainstream thing until HALF-LIFE 2 six years later. But before you get too excited, understand how they implemented it - to interact with the world of the game, you directly control your character's fully modeled right arm in its full range of motion. Like, you hold left mouse to extend the arm and then move the mouse to wave it around and do shit. You gotta aim your arm to pick things up or open doors. There's no way to explain how clumsy this is without you seeing or playing it yourself. Imagine controlling HALF-LIFE: ALYX with a mouse.
So, that's the gameplay, that's how it works. Hard to wrap your mind around, but could probably be interesting or even fun if the game was well made! Well, guess what. This thing is so busted and unfinished it legitimately should not have been released. The physics are comically bad and all mandatory puzzles involving them will have you going insane trying to do the simplest things. Stacking three boxes to jump up onto something will take you tens of minutes. Keycards you need will fall through the world as you bash your hand against against a door frame trying to walk through it. Objects weighing hundreds of pounds will slide around frictionlessly against each other and slip out from under you like a watermelon seed as you walk on them. Oh, and you do actually get firearms and have to shoot dinosaurs quite regularly, but the guns are ......... are you ready for this? ......... also fully modeled physics objects. You have to pick them up manually with your arm, aim your arm in the direction of the Raptor about to kill you, and try to line up the iron sights to take a shot. Meanwhile, the dinosaur has run headlong into the end of your gun and your stupid noodle arm has folded up like a crinkly straw and you automatically dropped the gun on the ground and have to fumble around to try to pick it back up. Sound fun?
But okay, okay. Maybe the main gameplay conceit is somewhat hare-brained in the first place. And maybe the underlying physics engine is absolutely disastrous. It could be worth toughing that stuff out for an interesting, well-constructed adventure, right? RIGHT????
Well, yeah. But unfortunately, everything else about the game sucks too. Gameplay is literally 75% walking, as slow as you can POSSIBLY IMAGINE, through miles and miles of basically featureless jungle. The levels feel almost randomly assembled, and even in more densely and purposefully built areas, like ones with a bunch of buildings, the amount of space between objectives that you have to run back and forth between is sadistic. The dinosaurs sport genuinely hilarous AI and behaviors, and will sometimes do wacky things like die standing up, get stuck half inside objects, or accidentally skate down slopes at a million miles per hour like they're playing TRIBES. They're never scary, you can usually just avoid them by getting them stuck on the geometry, and they're always outside, making all indoor sections tensionless - presumably because trying to put one in a building would break the physics to such a degree that your computer would China Syndrome itself.
No real design skill or interesting storytelling going on - you're just solving the most basic physics puzzles, or key hunting, or following some light environmental clues to know where to go. The sum total of the story is just this lady who crashed in a plane trying to get off the island while snippets from John Hammond's fictional autobiography narrate things occasionally. Really just not much going on.
In spite of everything, you might enjoy some eerie moments slowly poking around in abandoned buildings, piecing together some little bits of enviromental storytelling, etc. It's there if you're that kind of person. I am! I love exploring weird horror or horror-adjacent stuff in first person, and I think that's why I've been giving this thing a chance since my teens. But good lord almighty, the juice is not worth the squeeze. It is at best a plodding, impossibly janky FPS, and at worst a JP-themed tech demo that does not function and should not have been commercially released. If you can believe it, there's a ton of quite interesting history about this game's development and the pre-release hype touting how revolutionary it was going to be. (Some real Molyneux levels of BS, go check it out sometime.) And yeah, that's fine. That's valid. I do believe that ambition and vision count for something, and I do understand that a game this bad can be made with good intentions. But at the end of the day, that doesn't make it not suck!
Anyway, everyone should really play this stupid game, or at least skip through a longplay of it. Hopefully I have now ragequit for the last time, and writing this has exorcised the demons. But it's probably just as likely that I'll load my save again tomorrow. Sigh.
If you're not familiar with this thing, it was meant to be a kind of prestige Jurassic Park version of HALF-LIFE - a totally immersive unbroken first-person journey through the abandoned ruins of that second island from The Lost World. But rather than employing traditional FPS mechanics to fulfill that assignment, the vision for the gameplay was complete interactivity with the environment using realistic real-time physics. Of course, that's something that we totally take for granted now, but it was more or less unheard of at the time of this game's development, and wouldn't really be a mainstream thing until HALF-LIFE 2 six years later. But before you get too excited, understand how they implemented it - to interact with the world of the game, you directly control your character's fully modeled right arm in its full range of motion. Like, you hold left mouse to extend the arm and then move the mouse to wave it around and do shit. You gotta aim your arm to pick things up or open doors. There's no way to explain how clumsy this is without you seeing or playing it yourself. Imagine controlling HALF-LIFE: ALYX with a mouse.
So, that's the gameplay, that's how it works. Hard to wrap your mind around, but could probably be interesting or even fun if the game was well made! Well, guess what. This thing is so busted and unfinished it legitimately should not have been released. The physics are comically bad and all mandatory puzzles involving them will have you going insane trying to do the simplest things. Stacking three boxes to jump up onto something will take you tens of minutes. Keycards you need will fall through the world as you bash your hand against against a door frame trying to walk through it. Objects weighing hundreds of pounds will slide around frictionlessly against each other and slip out from under you like a watermelon seed as you walk on them. Oh, and you do actually get firearms and have to shoot dinosaurs quite regularly, but the guns are ......... are you ready for this? ......... also fully modeled physics objects. You have to pick them up manually with your arm, aim your arm in the direction of the Raptor about to kill you, and try to line up the iron sights to take a shot. Meanwhile, the dinosaur has run headlong into the end of your gun and your stupid noodle arm has folded up like a crinkly straw and you automatically dropped the gun on the ground and have to fumble around to try to pick it back up. Sound fun?
But okay, okay. Maybe the main gameplay conceit is somewhat hare-brained in the first place. And maybe the underlying physics engine is absolutely disastrous. It could be worth toughing that stuff out for an interesting, well-constructed adventure, right? RIGHT????
Well, yeah. But unfortunately, everything else about the game sucks too. Gameplay is literally 75% walking, as slow as you can POSSIBLY IMAGINE, through miles and miles of basically featureless jungle. The levels feel almost randomly assembled, and even in more densely and purposefully built areas, like ones with a bunch of buildings, the amount of space between objectives that you have to run back and forth between is sadistic. The dinosaurs sport genuinely hilarous AI and behaviors, and will sometimes do wacky things like die standing up, get stuck half inside objects, or accidentally skate down slopes at a million miles per hour like they're playing TRIBES. They're never scary, you can usually just avoid them by getting them stuck on the geometry, and they're always outside, making all indoor sections tensionless - presumably because trying to put one in a building would break the physics to such a degree that your computer would China Syndrome itself.
No real design skill or interesting storytelling going on - you're just solving the most basic physics puzzles, or key hunting, or following some light environmental clues to know where to go. The sum total of the story is just this lady who crashed in a plane trying to get off the island while snippets from John Hammond's fictional autobiography narrate things occasionally. Really just not much going on.
In spite of everything, you might enjoy some eerie moments slowly poking around in abandoned buildings, piecing together some little bits of enviromental storytelling, etc. It's there if you're that kind of person. I am! I love exploring weird horror or horror-adjacent stuff in first person, and I think that's why I've been giving this thing a chance since my teens. But good lord almighty, the juice is not worth the squeeze. It is at best a plodding, impossibly janky FPS, and at worst a JP-themed tech demo that does not function and should not have been commercially released. If you can believe it, there's a ton of quite interesting history about this game's development and the pre-release hype touting how revolutionary it was going to be. (Some real Molyneux levels of BS, go check it out sometime.) And yeah, that's fine. That's valid. I do believe that ambition and vision count for something, and I do understand that a game this bad can be made with good intentions. But at the end of the day, that doesn't make it not suck!
Anyway, everyone should really play this stupid game, or at least skip through a longplay of it. Hopefully I have now ragequit for the last time, and writing this has exorcised the demons. But it's probably just as likely that I'll load my save again tomorrow. Sigh.
2 Comments
@Vee that's correct, in addition to your her floppy, goofy right arm, the only other part of your player character that is actually modeled is her massive rack, to accommodate your ability to look down and utilize that, let's say creatively integrated HUD element. So theoretically if you were to switch to a third-person perspective, you character would be nothing but a big floating pair of tits with one arm attached to it.
Vee
6 months ago