Insecticide
Score: 55% ESRB: Everyone 10+ Publisher: Gamecock Media Developer: Crackpot Entertainment Media: Cartridge/1 Players: 1 Genre: Third Person Shooter/ Adventure
Graphics & Sound: When you consider what typically shows up on the DS, Insecticide isn't all that bad. In-game graphics look fairly well detailed. Most main characters are easily distinguishable, especially your character, Chrys Liszt. Environments have a very film-noir feel, and by film-noir, I mean dark and gloomy. Cut scenes come in two flavors; there are the still-frame images with text, and full motion video that is really well detailed. I found myself impressed by the FMVs, since that is rarely seen on a DS game. In the end, there only a few cut scenes done in this fashion, but that is understandable considering the size limitations typically found on cartridge-based, hand-held systems. Audio is fairly lackluster. During the FMVs, the narrator, Chrys' partner, Roachy, does a superb job of giving the appropriate feel for the game, but the rest of the audio-production feels very bland and canned.
Gameplay: I have to give props for Insecticide's attempt to blend typical third-person shooter mechanics with point-and-click adventure style gameplay. Unfortunately, the result is a game where both aspects come through only fairly, and combine into something that is far from perfect. During the shooter parts of the game, running around and shooting your enemies just doesn't feel right at all. I found that controlling Chrys in a 3D space (which you have to do for both types of levels), was awkward at best, and troublesome more times than not. I'm not sure if it's just the fact that I've gotten used to controlling my character in a 3D world with an analog stick or what, but using the D-pad to run around just felt wrong and very stiff. The point-and-click style adventure aspects also come off not quite polished. While in adventure mode, you will run around various areas of the city or police station trying to fulfill a series of tasks. The first of these sequences has you trying to bring the evidence board up to date. You need to collect the bomb pictures, witness list and an interview with the hominid that was found at the scene of the crime. Invariably, the solutions to these problems are pretty obvious, but require you to jump through a large number of hoops to actually get through. For instance, Roachy has the witness list, somewhere, but he doesn't remember where it is. He claims coffee will help him out, so of course, you need to get him the coffee; only after bringing it does he tell you he needs creamer, and so on. In the end, the puzzles aren't all that interesting and feel more like fetch quests. It just feels like, instead of trying to make an adventure title, or a shooter title and attempting to work the other aspect in, both parts were developed as equals, and as a result, neither one shines all that brightly. The premise of the game is well thought out, at least. In the future, humans developed what they hoped were the ultimate in anti-insect crops. Well, things didn't quite work out and it caused the insect population of the Earth to evolve at an advanced rate. Fast forward to an even further point in time and we have Insecticide. Insects are now the dominant race and what humans are left are a devolved creature known as Hominids. Insecticide is the story of a detective squad and starts off with a murder at the Nectarola (a soft drink, of course) plant.
Difficulty: Insecticide's difficulty is a mixed bag. The shooter aspects aren't all that hard, unless you consider the very platformer feel of them combined with the hard-to-handle controls. The toughest aspect of this part of the game was always the aiming, never the A.I. or environmental variables; just the raw mechanics of the game. Insecticide would have been a lot more enjoyable if the shooter sections of the game were tougher, but in the sense of a better A.I., and only if coupled with better control over your character. As far as the puzzle-solving aspects, the only real difficulty was trying to figure out where the item you needed to grab might be hiding, never trying to figure out what you need to do to actually solve the problem at hand. I found these most frustrating when the solution to the problem was obvious, but the items I needed were in the most illogical spaces (like the aforementioned creamer).
Game Mechanics: I've sort of been harping on Insecticide's mechanics the whole review, but I haven't really explained what about them doesn't feel right. Well, the first aspect is how Chrys is controlled in the 3D world. Put simply, you use your D-pad as if it was an analog stick. Unfortunately, that doesn't really translate all that well. Instead of getting smooth motion, especially when turning, you get very choppy movement. For instance, if you have to jump on a series of platforms that spiral upwards, you have to jump onto the platform, then stop, use your Left or Right D-pad buttons to rotate to line up your next jump and then jump again. The motion would just be a lot smoother on an analog stick rather than the current implementation. Now before I start hearing people say that I am griping about the system and not the game, I would just like to say that I see no real reason this game couldn't have been on the PSP. The only time the lower screen really comes into use is when you are in an adventure section and you are examining something. Then, you pull out your stylus and try to drag various items into your inventory, or drag inventory items onto things on the screen. While this exact action wouldn't be able to be done on the PSP, there could be ways around it, like providing a cursor on the screen that is controlled by the system's analog nub. Typically, I would claim a game with this kind of score should be approached by only the most avid fan of the game's genre, and while I would like to recommend this game to either adventure or shooter fans, Insecticide does neither part well enough to make it worth your while.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
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