The Killer in Me
There are a very wide variety of things to kill, and they are well implemented using the theme of different alien worlds. So, for example, with one of the mission worlds you find yourself on you spend the entire mission up against mutants with no projectile weapons. This means that you basically have a brilliantly fast-paced kill-fest against enemies whose main strengths are numbers and speed. I guess this may be appealing to the Serious Sam fans out there; it certainly makes a nice change from the standard bullet-dodging gameplay and I’m really impressed that the developers didn’t give in to the temptation to pop a couple of grunts with guns in just out of habit. Those who like the bullet-dodging thing needn’t despair, as there is plenty of that in other missions along with a really interesting, and occasionally amusing, range of baddies to kill and indigenous life forms which you can either kill, avoid, or just admire depending on your wont. My favourite creature so far is a huge, wiffling, beast that is crashed out on a bridge on your way to the sharp end of your mission, kind of like a pet wolfhound hogging the sofa. But uglier.
As you would expect with this genre there’s a pretty comprehensive array of weapons to choose from, and while they are all a little over-done for my taste with exciting bits of metal sticking out all over the place with, as far as I can tell the single purpose of looking like exciting bits of sticky-outy metal they have a really mean feel to them. You definitely wouldn’t want to be looking at the wrong end of an Unreal II weapon, which is a shame really as that’s exactly what a lot of the game entails. All in all the weapons aren’t that original for the most part – you have the usual pistol, general-purpose assault-rifle, rocket-launcher, and, of course, somewhat ubiquitous shotgun. There are some more exotic weapons as well but as I always feel that finding and using new weapons throughout the game is part of the appeal I won’t spoil it for you by telling you what they are. Suffice to say they’re all good, solid, dirty fun.
Enemy AI is actually unnervingly good, and as I mentioned earlier, gives you a real sense that the baddies seriously hate you and that you’ve walked into something that maybe you shouldn’t gone into with merely an assault rifle, rocket launcher, pistol, sniper rifle, shotgun, 500lbs of ammunition for each, and a trolley to cart them all around on (I can never understand why they don’t show that – I mean no-one can carry that much kit on their back and, apart from anything else, you could hide behind it in a fire-fight … of course ladders could be a problem). Enemy soldiers will use cover and formations, and won’t just charge at you blindly; enemy mutants will … well, yeah, they will just come at you blindly actually, screaming for your blood and trying to kill you with everything they have, but they do it very well and are pretty much guaranteed to scare you silly.