Instinct
Score: 69% ESRB: Mature Publisher: Wild Hare Developer: Digital Spray Studios Media: DVD/1 Players: 1 Genre: First Person Shooter
Graphics & Sound: There is probably nothing harder than to get your game into a foreign market. I have read many stories of great American games that have tried to cross the waters, only to have their games bashed once they reached the shores. Instinct is a contribution from Russia, but it just didn't have what it took to draw a large amount of attention to itself by our standards. It is a translation thing. Not just language, but culture as well. Here in the States, we are more than inundated with the FPS genre, and we have really high expectations. So, it is easy to quickly see by comparison that a Russian first person shooter may have an uphill battle to fight. Though not attempting to be a next-gen masterpiece, the game has consistent flow. The look and feel was on par with a budgeted FPS. The opening introduction scene has that early '90s, live-action flair about it. Human actors against cheaply propped and digitized backdrops. Flash-like animations of pictures overlaying each other. It has very distinct nostalgic nature to it. I am sure, though, it could be lost on some as cheap and quick. I may quickly find a rut in this review of bringing up the word average. I don't mean that in a terrible way, but for example, the soundtrack was an average experience. Nothing moved me to want to hear a particular section over again. In the same breath, I say that there was nothing distracting about it either. If you speak Russian, you may be happy with the voiceovers, whereas I am at a loss to judge.
Gameplay: Instinct instantly drops you into the action. After the short intro piece, you are dropped into the middle of the fray. The game takes a lot on faith that everyone playing it is used to FPS gameplay, because there is no tutorial to speak of. It took me a sec to stop what was happening and hence leave the game space and read the control setup. One button you will need to quickly learn, and probably more important than the reload button, is the journal button. Keeping to the game's original form, there is no English dubbing or subtitles. So, smack dab in a foreign land and listening to a foreign language, you are being shot at because you're there. So, you shoot back. Not very deep, but very simple. Simple can be good right? The premise of the game is you are called upon to infiltrate a laboratory in North Korea. Once you have made it through the complex to the lab, you are happy to discover that a zombie-creating protovirus has been released, and now it is time to escape. The look, the feel and the absolute simplicity of the game make it, well, average. Now I asked before if simple was good? Work this out in your head. Not everyone on the planet owns a computer that is capable of running Bioshock at maximum frame rate. And this game isn't going to ping the depths of your pocket either. It is a simple game done well enough.
Difficulty: One thing Instinct does not suffer from is mind-numbing obscure puzzles. OK, so there are some puzzles, but mostly it is move forward down the storyline on rails and shoot anything moving that isn't you. There isn't much to the actual difficulty of the game. There is the classic Easy, Medium and Hard. The only problem is that this system is the antiquated idea of you die easier and they die slower. You play an FPS for different reasons. How simple and linear it may be isn't one of them usually. The game is just too easy to get through. Move forward and shoot. Hit the J key to see what was said, unless you're lucky enough to understand what is said around you. I found that by the time I cleared an area and felt safe enough to read what is said, it occasionally lost relevance because the action and the mood was just over.
Game Mechanics: Physics seem to both help and hinder Instinct's case. Now usually, whenever you shoot someone or in this case something, they will give with the impact of the strike, not here though. Once they do decide to die, they rag doll nicely, but it jumps from bullet proof to rag doll with little in between. There are some well-placed physics mechanics on assets such as gas canisters. Hit one of these babies and they will become a missile and ricochet off the walls or take out enemies. They also loved there flaming barrels. I bet there was a national memo saying that their guards must all protect the national fuel supply, because everywhere there were soldiers, there was a barrel to shoot and blow up. This was not a game built on a multi-million dollar budget in a huge studio. I am sure that the product ended up as good as they were able to pull off with the tools they had. The result may not be grand, but they have achieved a straightforward game. Albeit too straightforward. There were a few issues that took you out of the flow of the game. All things said and done with this game, it was unable to live up to expectations for this style of game. A good start? I would say it was a steady start. Nothing time and tools couldn't fix.
-WUMPUSJAGGER, GameVortex Communications AKA Bryon Lloyd
Minimum System Requirements: Windows XP w/SP2, 2 ghz Pentium 4 Processor 2.0 or higher, 512 MB, 8 Gb free space, 128 Direct x 9.0 Compatible, DVD-ROM   Test System: Windows XP Pro, 3.2 GHz P4HT CPU, 2 GB Ram, 512 PCIE 16 ATI X1600XT
Lair BioShock