No Escape is based on a movie I've never seen starring Ray Liotta (RIP), I assume the movie has to be better since the game is super annoying and boring.

It's a side-scrolling action-platformer game, and the first thing that happens is a bunch of freak assholes charge at you constantly from the left side of the screen. You could try your damnedest to kill them, but they'll always respawn and overwhelm you, leaving you to run through the stage which is ripe with damaging traps. Imagine if you were playing Sonic 2 and as soon as you spawned into Emerald Hill a mob of monkey robots constantly spawned from the left and tried to beat the shit out of you with baseball bats, leaving you with no time to get acquainted with the game's controls.

Which speaking of, the controls are really bad. Any time you crouch or pull yourself up from a ledge you have to press up to go back into "standing mode", otherwise you walk around in this doofy "I'm being stealthy" pose that's slower than your standard walk. Your jumps always have this second of landing recovery and your punches have no impact, it's like they tried to make the movement methodical like Flashback Quest for Identity. but put a bunch of Contra enemies in it and threw a ton of traps in to land constant cheap shots on you. It's just horrifically badly designed.

After the beginning stage you get into a boss fight with some guy with a polearm, he has little recovery on his attacks so you're basically just sitting there constantly punching him hoping you can out-dps him or get lucky. I eventually got into a sweet spot where I could constantly sweep him and his attacks mostly didn't hit me. A rare time where bad hitboxes aided me in this kind of game. After this is some bullshit where you can select a stage and after that is when I checked out, because this game is fuckin' dumb.

Two thumbs up. Love ya Ray.

Reviewed on May 26, 2022


1 Comment


2 years ago

Yeah, RIP.