Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.2 for Windows

When the KISS Psycho Circus game finally hit stores in mid July, it didn?t receive good criticism from the gaming publications despite all the coverage praising it coming from the previews section [Hint to game reviewers: don?t preview a game saying it?s gonna be great to then bash it when you get a copy of the finished product to review].

One of the game?s worst flaws was (in the opinion of those reviewers) the problem concerning the KISS content. Or lack of it, actually.
Indeed, this game doesn?t have much to do with KISS, with the exception that you can play four guys that look remotely similar to the members of the rock band, and that
there are some of their songs put to good use here and there.


Not that bad coming from the Daikatana team

The Third Law development studio (authors of the game being reviewed here) were once part of the team responsible for Daikatana (I?m sure you have heard of this one at least once in your life). All right, maybe you haven?t, so let?s say Daikatana was the second most anticipated title in the history of PC gaming, (after the infamous Diablo II). The game was in development for more than three years, it swapped licensed engines two times (or were they three?) and when it finally came to market, its unfinished and uninspired levels, broken AI, terrible sound and chaotic story easily made it the king of bad production.

Part of the Daikatana team, seeing how the game was going (before it was published), decided to get the hell out of Ion Storm and created a new company of their own: Third Law.

The urge to get done a product of their own (fearing to be found guilty for the Daikatana ?incident?) was stronger than the real idea behind it: to make it a quality title. There was no time to code an engine from the ground up, so they opted for purchasing the Lith Tech engine instead.
And here we find one of the game?s most noticeable flaws. I?ll be honest with you, the guys did a great a job polishing that rusted engine, but that just wasn?t enough. You can see their hard efforts if you compare KISS?s graphics to those in Monolith?s Sanity (the owners of the engine). There are far more polygons on the units, and the characters even move their lips while talking, something I thought impossible with that engine.
But the boxy aspect from the Blood 2 days is still present here, and the complete lack of curved surfaces won?t be very healthy to your eyes if you got used to the more complex Quake III or UT, believe me!


The elders are back!

But the point here is not visual performance; what?s inside the box is what really matters. In terms of gameplay, the problem isn?t the lack of KISS material for me, but what the developers really wanted to do with their game.
If you, like me, have been playing first person shooters (FPS) for quite some time, you will instantly notice the programmer?s admiration for the old days of shootin?.

This game borrows features from almost all the successful shooters from the early nineties. There are all those senseless (but funny) power-ups put there to enhance some of the character?s abilities, found in Duke Nukem and other similar titles.
Then you have those health potions in the form of levitating bottles of blue liquid, cut and pasted directly from Hexen. Even the enemies look like polygon-based imitations of the old baddies, the arachni-clown is the worst of the lot, an unoriginal version of the noisy arachnoctron from Doom (I think it?s misspelled).

Level design also shows the influence of old school FPS gaming with everything strictly divided into big, square and rectangular rooms. Or perhaps that?s just LithTech?s fault!

Controls are also like those in the early 90?s, with the happy exception that there are both joystick and mouse support. The strafe option begins to make sense again, thanks to the way some foes attack; there are little, dog-like monsters that spit fireballs at the player like those nasty brown daemons from Doom.

One thing about the monsters, though, they are thrown at the player constantly in a senseless way. You will meet the weakest of the lot, the headless, a couple hundred times in each level since there are certain points where other ?mother? monsters keep vomiting them ad nauseam. I know we shooter fans are supposed to be brainless idiots with a dark tendency to blast people and blow stuff up, but we need a break from time to time too.
And speaking of ?headless? enemies, the Artificial Intelligence is far from perfect. Maybe that?s why the developers decided to continually throw foes at you, to hide the AI limitations...


Conclusion

In short, trying to resurrect a long ago buried playing style isn?t a bad thing from time to time, the problem pops up when you tell people the product is centered around the KISS band, which has not much to do with the real topic.

KISS fans will be disappointed because there?s not enough material from the band to warrant a purchase, while hardcore FPS gamers will put it down because of the issues mentioned above.