kotaku escribió:After being subjected to a screeching slideshow (theme music was likewise horrible for all these logos) I finally got to the main menu, which also looked like crap. A very jumpy, pixilated loop of red blood cells and cancer cells floating through tubes.
Once in the actual missions, you are given a brief lecture pertaining to the particular teenage cancer patient you're inside. What kind of cells you're looking for, objectives, etc. Then you get an unskippable and poorly-animated cutscene featuring the two irritating main characters: ROXXI the nanobabe and her accent-slinging robot helper.
ROXXI looked cute in the game packaging but in the game itself she is horrible. Screechy, ugly, uncanny and repetitive.
The gameplay is all about zooming through various tubes of the human body and shooting gummi-looking cancer cells with your chemo gun. Which is actually pretty fun until you start running into the nonsensical limitations of the control scheme. You can only aim so far up or down, so in many cases if you're far enough above or below a target, you're just SOL.
Every level looks approximately the same, and every level is extremely time-consuming. The main feature of the little cancer baddies is that they replicate quickly, so most of the gameplay is flying back and forth between ammo spawns and clusters of cancer cells. I cheated and skipped around to different levels for research purposes (I do it all for you, you jerks), and the whole thing is like this.
I'm going to treat Re-Mission as if it was a rough draft for indie and/or serious games of the future. So here's your To-Do list, Hopelab:
* Shorten and tighten. This could be a very entertaining hour-long tromp, if you used all the resources wasted on making it a timesink, for developing the actual game mechanics and variety in levels.
* More character, less gloss. Spend less resources on attempting to create cutting-edge, realistic graphics, because you will always fail. You, charity game studio, are the fat kid in the summer camp caper movie of the games industry. Instead, focus on character and cartooning. This will win you more hearts than realism, because "realistic graphics" become obsolete in a matter of years and all people can remember is that it was "cutting-edge, at the time". Cartoons are forever. Look at Sam and Max.
* Save function should be available throughout the level, not just between levels.
* For the love of god and all that is holy, let me skip cutscenes! This is the video game equivalent of tl;dr. It is a bannable offense. And since Halflife came out, having cutscenes at all is highly suspicious.
* Smaller HUD. My ammo indicator was bigger than my character onscreen.
* More textures. Seeing the same pink, pulsing donut walls through the ordeal just made everything worse.
You know what this game should have been? There's an episode of Invader ZIM called Nanozim that would have made a perfect basis for a game of this type. A balls-out robot fight through the corridors of the human body.
That's it. I am done staring at this game. If anyone reading this is, or knows, a cancer patient between the ages of 10 and 19, and would like a free copy of Re-Mission, I will happily mail them mine. Just hit me up with an address and I'll send it your way, and in return you can tell me if I'm way out of line here.