Techtite's Playstation-2 Reviews!

"Take away the pushed release dates and failed chance at being a system's 'launch title,' and it's still a cool game."

---from the review

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 Nightshade: The Official Strategy Guide

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Sidebar :

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Once intended as an "X-box exclusive," now on PS-2. Good move...? Sure it is! At least the designers of this game finally got their design scheme right, by giving the game over to "us" in the world of Sony Playstation-2. Don't get me wrong; PS-2 is a very manly game console, but games on Sony systems are a much wider spectrum than other systems. Game Cube seems too into Super Mario Clones, while X-Box makes games that can take themselves too seriously for their own good. PS-2 games have a wide array of fun games that don't take themselves seriously; just enjoy the game and have a good time. As such, Malice finds herself among Jak, Daxter, Sly Cooper, Crash Bandicoot, and a whole wide array of similar heroes and heroines. While this pits Malice against some hearty competition on the shelf, it may also catch the eye of the fans of all the above game series...and it should. Malice may not be as "classic" as the aforementioned game sagas, but it's still pretty fun.

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Malice

Click picture to order this game (Playstation-2)

A Techtite Review

Malice was once intended as an X-Box "launch" title, only to be released very recently, on both that system, and the Playstation-2. Through a long bumpy road of bad luck, pushed release dates, failed publishing deals, and other mishaps, the game is finally out, albeit with very little publicity at all. That's a shame, because had this game been released with the X-Box back in 2002, it surely would've been able to sell better, on a new game system with very few Super-Mario-clone game titles, even to this very day. However, on a game system where Sly Cooper, Jak, Daxter, Ratchet, Clank, and many more are a major commodity; can it compete?

I'll say one thing for this game: it's got a very attention grabbing, darkly humorous prologue. Malice is a spunky heroine who goes with reckless abandon to defeat this game's "big bad." Whoops! Someone forgot to tell her this is the beginning of the game; the big bad guy not only defeats her, he promptly kills her, Beetlejuice-style (in other words; with a fair share of dark humor, not gore). Malice goes to the afterlife, her head in hand (literally), only to discover she isn't even supposed to be there; she's a goddess! She is quickly ordered to go back to the world of the living to reclaim her one true destiny...and kick major Big Bad butt.

I think what really surprised me when playing this game was when seeing the villains' many henchmen you fight. To be direct: they're birds. This colored me all shades of "shocked," when I thought that the box cover implied that Malice was fighting creatures with giant claws. Those aren't claws; they're beaks. You're fighting a bunch of giant, walking, cawing birds! This is the game's biggest mistake, because old Alfred Hitchcock movies notwithstanding, there really isn't anything very menacing about a bunch of birds, even birds with guns. That's my own opinion anyway.

If only the villains you fight were as inspired as the levels. In one area you talk to a giant tree; not too original, yet very well animated, especially when a mission has you go into the tree, and defeat a giant termite (of sorts) that is threatening said tree. I can't remember in my collective memory a game which had you talk to a character, only to enter the character, "Innerspace" style, to help said character...even a tree. Oh well; chalk up one inspired level for Malice! Later missions have you doing stuff that is as common as it is well "mapped," like jumping from pipe to pipe in a giant factory, or an escape from a prison cell, without any weapons. So chalk up two more imaginative level maps.

You can also add "good humor" to the list of this game's pros. In one area, a mother insect wants you to find her baby insects, scattered about a hard-to-traverse maze of precarious ledges. Does she want them back due to a mother's unequaled love? Nah; "I need my kids...or else I lose my social security!" she confesses. I guess the joke gets a bit lost in the translation, but seeing a mother bug confess that the only reason she wants her buggy kids around is for income purposes, is pretty funny. A similar piece of droll humor comes when you receive your first weapon upgrade, which Malice wishes to confirm is a strong enough weapon, before she goes into more hostile territory:

Malice: "Will [this new weapon] kick butt?"
Upgrade Machine: "Like a Concrete Mule."
Malice: "I'm gone..."

Sadly; this weapon upgrade is one of only a very short spattering of upgrades you'll ever receive. While there is the occasional power-up like a shield of invincibility, for the most part you're a lone character with a lone weapon allowing the lone ability to whack your enemies flat with your super mallet. True; Super Mario never had too many super powers, but come on.

Not that there aren't a lot of little added touches, that show a lot of surprising ingenuity. For one; your death doesn't lead to a simple game over screen. It leads instead to a "last chance" game level in the afterlife, where your mission is to fulfill various mini-missions to get back to the world of the living. Fail once more, and then it's "game over." That's not only fair...it's an additional level. Given that it's a level of the undead, it's also pretty darn fun, with lots of cool ghost and zombie FX. In a crazy world, before you reach the final boss, you may actually want to die just to see this level.

Sadly, you'll want to see this additional level for an added reason; the game itself is way too short. In fact, in typically poor AI design, the final boss is way too much easier to defeat than the second-last boss; a sure fire sign of a game that was very quickly finished, with little attention put to the final battle at all. This is of course predictable when the game was already bumped so many times, it's of little surprise if the game design team didn't simply quickly finish whatever they had done and release it, so they could move on to a new game entirely.

The underlying question is: should gamers follow their lead? That's a toughie, even though I can't say enough how fun this game was, as little of it that there was. I cannot say the same for a wide array of games I've played. There are games I've played that, quite frankly, could suck the paint off a Toyota at 100 paces. That's some seriously sucky gaming! This wasn't like that. It was funny, it was cute, and it was easy to get the hang of, with just the right number of boss characters. Then again; it was also very, very short. I'll give this game a marginal thumbs-up, if only because I would be lying if I said I did not enjoy playing it. You could do much worse than this game when placed in the bargain bin. As for its chances of inspiring Malice 2 anytime soon, well...that's another story.

---Techtite