Extremely experimental, weirdly innovative and also very flawed, this was a very interesting experience. Extremely hard to recommend, but if you want to play an adventure/FPS game combined, it’s pretty fun.
There's an endless deluge of incredibly cool ideas, the manual opens with the president (who, at the time would've been Bill Clinton) being told by alien diplomats that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is actually a dreaming god and needs to be point-blank nuked in the next week or the world ends, and the guy you send is by himself, and has the power to speak with the dead to discover clues about what happened.
And that premise carries it pretty damn far, but there's a secret developer message that betrays the insane crunch this game went through to meet the MacWorld release date, and wow, you can tell. For instance, there's 25 levels, and the 4 levels before the final one are nearly identical teleporter mazes filled with the most frustrating enemy types.
The actual "speaking with the dead" thing is a little finnicky, but super satisfying to reveal the mysteries of the expeditions that descended into the pyramid before you, but the storytelling doesn't feel like it quite gets to the point where it "wants to be."
A point also has to be made about the movement speed, coming from finishing the Marathon trilogy the day prior picking this game up was a night and day difference. Corridors that could be crossed in a few seconds in another FPS of the time take 20-30 seconds at this almost hilariously slow trudging pace. Good luck learning how to dodge projectiles like that!
Overall, it does feel like a lot of this game do not hold up to the scrutiny of the last 30 years, but it does make a pretty solid experience given the technical, budgetary, and time constraints it was made under.
5/10, I played this only for the tenuous connections the story has to Marathon's.
(Played on the excellent Aleph One port by W'rkncacnter )
There's an endless deluge of incredibly cool ideas, the manual opens with the president (who, at the time would've been Bill Clinton) being told by alien diplomats that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is actually a dreaming god and needs to be point-blank nuked in the next week or the world ends, and the guy you send is by himself, and has the power to speak with the dead to discover clues about what happened.
And that premise carries it pretty damn far, but there's a secret developer message that betrays the insane crunch this game went through to meet the MacWorld release date, and wow, you can tell. For instance, there's 25 levels, and the 4 levels before the final one are nearly identical teleporter mazes filled with the most frustrating enemy types.
The actual "speaking with the dead" thing is a little finnicky, but super satisfying to reveal the mysteries of the expeditions that descended into the pyramid before you, but the storytelling doesn't feel like it quite gets to the point where it "wants to be."
A point also has to be made about the movement speed, coming from finishing the Marathon trilogy the day prior picking this game up was a night and day difference. Corridors that could be crossed in a few seconds in another FPS of the time take 20-30 seconds at this almost hilariously slow trudging pace. Good luck learning how to dodge projectiles like that!
Overall, it does feel like a lot of this game do not hold up to the scrutiny of the last 30 years, but it does make a pretty solid experience given the technical, budgetary, and time constraints it was made under.
5/10, I played this only for the tenuous connections the story has to Marathon's.
(Played on the excellent Aleph One port by W'rkncacnter )