By: John Doe
Graphically Apocalypse is pretty good. Lots of dynamic lighting and explosions, fill the screen and set the mood for this dark adventure. However, at times it’s too darn dark and you’ll be falling to your doom because you can’t see where you are going. There are a few occasions of these unavoidable deaths that you must learn from, which is piss poor cheap game design. More on that in a sec. There are a few occasions of slight slowdown when a ton of enemies get on screen, but they are obliterated so quickly that it makes no difference.
Control is handled in a throwback to the old Smash TV games (which is the best way to describe the control). For the uninitiated, the control pad moves you, and the 4 buttons do the firing. For example, if you press the Triangle button, you will shoot ahead of you, if you press the Circle button, you will shoot to the right. It takes a while to get the hang of it, but it does tend to work quite well. It does get a tad confusing when the camera gives you a side scrolling perspective, so you are traveling to the right, but still must press triangle to fire ahead of you. Jumping is decent enough and platform jumps are not nearly as frustrating as in "One" by ASC games.
Game design leaves a little bit to be desired. I detest games that thrown in an unavoidable trap, so that you die, only to have to avoid it the next time. Which is fun when you have to start right back at the beginning of the level. I thought programmers understood that this was amateurish game design. As well, often times in Apocalypse you may die because you have no idea which way to go, so you throw caution to the wind and try to jump to a platform, but alas, that wasn’t the way. And you die. YAY!
The enemy AI is stupid. They don’t try to avoid you, even though you just wiped out scores of their buddies. They just run straight into that flame-thrower. You definitely get the feeling that they are just cardboard cutout bad guys with no substance. That’s why they die so quickly. They are just simple obstacles to make the game a little harder. Look at the way the enemy AI in Metal Gear is. The impression is that the Genome soldiers are living breathing people. The enemies in this game are the polar opposite. Dumb ass robots on a suicide mission.
Soundwise this game isn’t offensive, although Bruce Willis’ one liners get tired quickly. How many times must I hear, "Shoot em all and let God sort em out." Not even original one liners, yet. Sheesh.
This game isn’t even bug free. A couple of times, my guns got stuck on auto fire and I could only shoot ahead of me. I had to restart the game to get this to stop. You don’t have to ask how much I enjoyed doing that, especially when I was so close to the end of a level. BOO HISS!
Another bone of contention is that Apocalypse was originally going to feature a tag along partner (albeit CPUY controlled) how hard would it have been to make this game two player? Just take out the ridiculous jumping parts, turn up the enemies and Shazam, you’ve got carnage with a friend. But who knows, maybe Apocalypse would have been infinitely worse as a two player game...
After all is said and done, Apocalypse isn’t a terrible game, it’s even kind of fun in spots, as some levels are real lookers. It’s definitely renter material. It’s too bad that this sort of game just hasn’t been done very well yet. It’s a dying genre that hasn’t even really had a chance to flourish, thanks to the so-so offerings in it’s category. Someday somebody HAS to get it right, and it will be only because of the all experimental games that dared to come before it and sacrifice themselves, like Contra, One, Assault and Apocalypse. At least they were good for something...
Final Analysis: