Here it comes: A 3D adventure in
real-time rendering!! The enemy is out ot get you! A mystery needs to be
solved!! The human race begins its battle with mysterious alien cells
that fuse with molecular structures of all kinds...
As per the Resident Evils, you're given a choice of two
characters to play. Mitsuki looks like a twelve year-old anime version
of Jill Valentine, with beret and all, doe-eyed and vaguely cute with
her shorts impractically plastered to her arse. Rick on the other hand
is quite grotesque in his square way and I recommend against him. They
both handle exactly the same (with the only cosmetic difference being
their weapons) and in any situation other than running, they are
animated dismally, and often hilariously. Characters rotate to face each
other without moving their legs. When idle they teleport and flinch
between strange poses to give a crappy illusion of life, and swivel
their heads madly like arbitrary Linda Blairs. It's hideous. The scenery
doesn't fare any better, clipping badly at times, being incorrectly
mapped in places so that you can walk through walls, and pissing you off
in general. Let me just say that tapping the shoulder button moves the
camera around behind you, except when it doesn't, which is at least half
the time.
Chaos Break is largely defined by its great empty
spaces. (Great meaning 'huge or immense', I use it in the perjorative
sense.) And I'm not just talking about the spaces hanging between every
painful word uttered by the cast in the excruciatingly acted and...
halting... dialogue scenes. I refer to the fact that the player must
roam sprawling networks of interminable grey corridors, searching in
vain for anything fun to do. If I said that the monsters were spread
thin, I would be exercising the fine art of understatement. It's not
just that there are almost no monsters, it's that what monsters there
are pose no real threat, or at least they don't when you put your laser
guns away. Also, they generally look, sound and act stupid. It turns out
that it's better to kill everything just by mashing the button for your
one little hand-to-hand attack. I found this out by accident the first
time I experienced distress that I was running out of ammo. There are
slithery alien worms - which admittedly are a little creepy - laughable
alien zombies, tree-trunk blob-like things that I don't know what they
are, and blue humanoids who are ripped off from Resident Evil's Hunters.
And
Chaos Break loves its longeurs. It will make you walk twenty miles and
back again through terrain in which absolutely nothing is happening to
open a door, then subject you to the same schtick again for the next
key. Computer terminals present simple number and swticheroo puzzles
which, when solved, don't indicate what part of the environment they
have altered (if any? How should I know, it would never tell! They never
had any effect that I could discern.) All the while, the Resident Evil
Diary-mimicking emails spin out a lame Japlish tale of researchers
losing their notes, being stung by wayward security systems and breeding
ENORMOUS KILLER RATS; surely the return of the greatest threat ever
posed to mankind by mad scientists!
I'll grant them this much -
someone worked hard on building suspense for the appearance of The Rat.
Having read extensively about the mutant rat 'which changed its colour'
in multiple emails for at least half the game, I just knew I was
eventually going to meet this creature, and I admit I even felt some
trepidation. And meet the rat I did. It was only as big as my character,
which is hardly enormous, but I'll concede that it's bigger than your
average rat, and the animal's scurrying was sufficiently gross to make
me feel twitchy. I flinched when the beast suddenly made a beeline for
me... and watched as it promptly got stuck running into a wall, which it
couldn't get around. Yes, they forgot to program the rat to turn
corners, this animal which is renowned for its ability to solve mazes.
So out of pity I opened fire and pasted what had been the one great hope
of Chaos Break, but which like the rest of the game, turned out to be
crap.
If this game is as facile as I say it is (and it is), you
may be wondering by this stage how I became stuck in it. I simply ran
out of places to go, and I started being flattened by indecipherable
messages. For instance, I'd approach a door whose acquaintance I'd never
made before, and try to open it, and be told: 'It isn't here. You have to be quick.'
All cynicism aside, I have absolutely no idea what it's talking about
here, in any context, and I did think hard on the subject. If it's a
bug, it obviously wouldn't be the first I've encountered, but it would
be the first fatal one. I tried using every special item I had in every
location I could logically think of, and some that I thought of
illogically, but to no avail.
It wasn't as if Chaos Break had
ever really suggested what I should do at any point on the way through,
anyway. I'd just kept exploring, walking for miles, finding keys,
solving unremarkable puzzles, laughing and wincing at the spectacular
air of poorness, zapping a monster once every fifteen minutes...
Eventually you're just worn out and you realise the whole game is pretty
unforgiveable, and you can't laugh anymore either. I feel the same way
about Chaos Break as I do about eating oysters or tongue-kissing heavy
smokers. I've given all three a fair shot, but never again.
In
complete isolation, there was one good thing about Chaos Break. The
combination of the sound effect of the facility's air-conditioning and
one piece of funereal organ music (heavily borrowing in style from Resident Evil, again) actually manages to create an oppressive atmosphere at times. That's it.
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