 Looking over my
initial notes for this review, Heavy Metal FAKK2 from Ritual Entertainment comes off worse
than it deserves. I let everyone from the
producers to the sound techs have it with all the bile only a pesky critic can create. FAKK2 to them.
But I’ve abandoned my ire because, on cool reflection, Heavy Metal isn’t
a bad game. It might have been a fun game. Even great. Instead
its potential is tossed into the void by bugs and shoddy construction.
 I haven’t read
the Heavy Metal comics in several years (all I can remember is nudity, sex, and aliens),
but figured that much of the adults-only edge would be contained in the game. Unfortunately there is no nude alien sex, but a
fairly tried and true narrative to get Julie, you, close to a bunch of bad guys. The game takes place 30 years after the events of
the animated film Heavy Metal 2000 on the planet of Eden.
Eden has “magic water” that keeps people young and frisky. The good colonists have protected their little
slice of heaven with a big energy shield and a big satellite, the FAKK2 (Federation
Assigned Ketogenic Killzone), which blares Neil Diamond tunes to keep away mall thugs in
baggy trousers. That water attracts the
attention of nefarious types, and it’s only a matter of time before some
uber-evildoer (Gith specifically) decides to take it.
 Heavy Metal begins
like a role-playing adventure. As Julie, you
talk with your pregnant sister, stroll around town, talk to inhabitants, perform a few
quests, and learn the ropes of butt-kicking all from a third-person perspective with
beautiful graphics. This truly is a pretty
looking and sounding game. Colors are vibrant
and cut scenes are accomplished with fluid camera movements. Voice acting is well done in spite of a few lines
of silly dialogue. The soundtrack is
listenable and often appropriate to the action.
A delightful sense of humor is also evident in various
encounters. Eden entertains the eyes and
ears, but it doesn’t stay that way. Pretty
soon its time to stop talking and start killing, which is were many of the game’s
problems begin. What could have been Tomb
Raider II but better ends up being just disappointing.
 Controlling Julie, at first blush,
looks like it’s gonna be a blast. She
can climb, maneuver across monkey bars and pipes, jump, fight with weapons in either hand,
perform weapon-combination attacks that depend on the both the weapons she’s using
and the sort of armor she has, push stuff around, and hug walls in order to inch along
small ledges. With this variety of possible
actions, one would think gameplay will be intellectually challenging and add some spice to
a game genre in need of some sprucing up. Instead
the game is horribly short and much of the difficulty arises not from tough challenges
requiring invention on the part of the player and combinations of techniques but from
really hard jumps. Read lots of really hard
jumps. Lots.
Since jumping makes up a large part of the game, you’d think that
control of Julie would be precise. You’d
be wrong. She bumps and slides around and
off objects like she’s covered in pig fat.
 If these were the
only problems, I’d give Heavy Metal a better review.
Good visuals and sound don’t make up for sloppy mechanics, but they at
least make the ride enjoyable. It’s the
bugs that destroy it. Heavy Metal crashes on
loading games, saving games, new games, shutting down, and starting up. Perform the wrong dance move and it crashes. Zig when it’s obvious you need to zag? Crash. The
load time between sections is incredibly long as well.
Get up, get a coke, read a magazine, read the mail, nap, discover a
forgotten tribe in New Guinea and still the friendly loading screen glares at you. That’s not all. FAKK2 takes a machine with muscle to run and the
minimum requirements are the barest of minimums. Just
try and make those leaps with the screen jerking like a mosh pit under a strobe light. I played with the most current patch and still had
several problems just keeping the game running.
Bestial flaws, poor utilization of in-game functionality, poor code,
and poor story scripting (a few hours of play isn’t worth the fifty dollar price
tag), obliterate what could have been a good game with all sorts of potential. It’s sort of like going to Vegas with no
money: all those pretty lights but you can’t do anything. As it additionally lacks an Adults Only feel (see
my above subtle hint at the need for more nude alien sex), there isn’t much reason to
try this title out. The first-person shooter
and third-person action/adventure need an infusion of innovation. FAKK2 could have been a step in the right
direction; as it is, it doesn't quite make it.
--Matt
Blackburn |
