Since the designers were too lazy to draw more than eight frames of animation for each character, nobody you choose can wear different armor or anything which would alter their appearance in any perceivable way. Sure you can hot-swap implants such as hearts, brains, and legs in the middle of combat, but none of them alters your character's look. Implants can award you various bonuses, from strength to charisma to night vision, but there's really no difference between them and no reason to care. You can pay to upgrade or enhance these implants, but it's impossible to tell if either of these actually accomplishes anything besides subtracting money from your character.

Fortunately, cash is never in any short supply, as the average dungeon is crawling with hundreds of cybernetic legs and brains for you to sell. Some enemies take this organ harvesting one step further, dropping entire arms onto the ground when they are killed. Why are mutant four-legged spiders walking around abandoned warehouses with cybernetic hands in their pockets? Who knows; that's a question scholars have been asking since the dawn of mankind. Plato came pretty close to solving it, but then he died when a fat mutant stabbed him outside a doorway.

As mentioned before, the game essentially boils down to about five central missions you must accomplish before the game ends and you're treated to a completely forgettable ending cinematic which was so amazingly uninteresting that I don't even remember if it even existed. These missions are all "blow up this warehouse" followed by "now blow up this warehouse" followed by "okay but what about blowing up this warehouse," and concluding with a "kill this guy in his warehouse" which is truly a welcome change of pace after the 100th warehouse randomly generated by an artificial intelligence so artificial that it makes me think Twinkies grow on trees. Some of these central missions contain "bosses," which are just like regular enemies only larger and more worthless. They don't drop anything of worth, they don't figure into the game's "plot" at all, and serve absolutely no purpose except to prove the animators knew how to take models and enlarge them to 300% without accidentally burning down the office.

There are many different types of weapons, from machine guns to plasma rifles, each with one unique model total. That's correct, every single handgun looks alike, every single shotgun looks alike, every single machine gun looks alike. Apparently drawing a few straight black lines posed too big of a technological hurdle for the Germans, who some day hope to master the whole "walking through doorways" thing. The identical gun phenomenon, paired with the identical clothing phenomenon, results in absolutely zero cosmetic customization for your character. If you're one of the countless people who spend 10 hours a day camping armor in Everquest so teenagers will have their asses blown off after viewing your totally tubular looking black and red magical dragon armor, this game will have about as much appeal to you as a bath. Then again, I can't really see anybody having much of an attraction to this game except possible the National Coalition of Idiots Producing Crap Games, and last time I checked, they were still fawning over Cold Fear.

There's really so much more I could bitch about in this game, but really, it won't make any difference. Nobody's going to buy this cesspit of an unfinished, buggy junk because it has had about as much exposure as the leaking cyst on my thigh. It's a monotonous, boring, level-grind through dull dungeons populated by equally dull monsters and weapons. The artificial intelligence, plot, character animations, and virtually everything else of value seems to be missing, perhaps to be patched in at a later date. If you're really hard up for a game involving mutants and cyberspace, go play Wasteland or the old Shadowrun for the Genesis. Both contain superior graphics and story line, and you don't have to worry about fat shirtless men running after you with kitchen knives, only to be stuck in the doorway. This game is a huge disappointment, and that's coming from a person who never heard of it or expected anything besides a software box that didn't launch handfulls of poisonous snakes at me when I opened it.

Oh yeah, and one last thing: after you beat the game, YOU HAVE TO START OVER FROM THE BEGINNING AGAIN AND REPEAT THE ENTIRE THING. What the hell is the point of that? The game was terrible the first time; the reward you get for beating it is the ability to play it again? That's like rewarding surviving cancer patients by giving them AIDS.

Graphics:- 7
Gameplay:- 10
Story:- 9
Sound:- 7
Fun:- 10
Overall:- 43

Each category in the rating system is based out of a possible -10 score (-10 being the worst). The overall score is based out of a possible -50 score (-50 being the worst).

– Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka (@TwitterHasBannedAllMyAccountsEver)

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