Endgame Preview

Light-gun games will probably always occur at a relative trickle, and things are probably much better for this. Still, an occasional release in that category is usually welcome, and, given the likes of Gunfighter: The Legend of Jesse James, greatly appreciated, when they turn out decently. Empire Interactive is doing its part in this regard by releasing Endgame, a PS2-exclusive light-gun shooter. It's looking sharp by all regards--it is done in full 3D, complete with destructible environments, and it is designed around Time Crisis-style duck-and-shoot mechanics, with which you can seldom go wrong. Included are also a host of clever touches, which could end up being quite endearing.

However superfluous stories might seem in these games, Endgame certainly has one. Its star is known simply as Jade, an American girl studying fashion design in the UK in the near future. Things go insane for her when her boyfriend Tyler phones one day, frantically telling her to get the heck out of her flat. Turns out that EuroDream soldiers--EuroDream being the VR company that Tyler works for--are on their way to the place, waving guns. Lo and behold, just as you see him being carted away on the videophone's screen, a bunch of guards bust through the door. Jade then grabs her gun, and you assume her role. Since she plays a whole bunch of old-style light gun games in her spare time, she knows the drill quite well.

What ensues is a gunfight in very cramped quarters, with all sorts of furniture and flatware getting blasted in the process. The game's actual mechanics are a lot like most modern gun games--you can duck or retreat behind whatever piece of cover you're near, load your gun, and emerge to shoot. Your gun is automatically reloaded whenever you duck, so doing this, along with learning the patterns at which your particular enemies fire, makes up the brunt of the gameplay. There's the shooting too, of course, though it barely requires explanation--you simply shoot at what you aim at onscreen. There's a whole lot to shoot in the environments we've seen, though, which, at the very least, provides a nice diversion from the point at hand. In the first flat stage, for instance, anything you see is fair game. You can shoot out cabinets and racks and watch their contents spill and shatter, or you can blast the shades off lamps or even shoot out entire lights, which, at this point, serve the purpose of subtly darkening the room. If the developers can make it more drastic in the final, then all the better.

There's also an ever-present timer, which kills you when it reaches zero. This, along with the enemies shooting at you, makes for a pretty deadly game. We've seen a couple of varieties of enemies in the build we have, including ones who simply shoot at you, some who shoot at you and take cover, and some who hide behind bulletproof shields between shots. There's also one enemy who came on the scene pretty rarely--a thinner, sort of assassinlike assailant who packed a pair of guns and shot pretty quickly. The mix feels pretty good at this point, and the fact that each of these enemy types picks from a handful of appearances makes them feel like an actual gang when they're standing, ducking, and dodging there, shooting at you. Innocent bystanders also occasionally populate the levels, and they're pretty hard to miss at this point, standing in the foreground dressed in bright colors, waving their arms frantically. Overall, the enemies definitely feel wily, the pacing is pretty intense, and everything moves at a very brisk rate. The fact that some of your views while "ducking" are kind of skewed and frantic makes the whole thing feel pretty nerve-racking, which is a very good thing.

Endgame looks pretty interesting too. The in-game graphics are nice, clean, and serviceably detailed, if a bit no-frills. It's the fact that everything is (or can be) in constant motion that makes the game visually exciting. You'll think of games like Area 51 without a doubt, even though the visuals aren't digitized by any means. Rather, since they're shooting for something more photo-realistic than Namco and Sega's shooters, the end result ends up feeling like real-time 3D graphics stylized to make reference to digitized graphics. It seems to work pretty well too. The cutscenes seem a bit more heavily stylized in this manner, but that's just because you can actually look at things closely, rather than shoot at them as they move.

All in all, Endgame looks like it's shaping up to be a pretty decent shooter. The boss fights are supposed to be pretty intense--with reactive AI and all--but we've yet to play through one. There will be seven bosses in it, in any event, and you'll travel to 20 different locations in the game's world. Aside from the story mode, there will be a whole bunch of play modes, including a mirror mode (which places you on the opposite side of every one of the game's encounters), a dual-gun mode (for one or two players), and even a training mode that's designed as a whole separate game--Mighty Joe Jupiter, specifically, which is Jade's favorite. The game will support Namco's GunCon2, though the version we played wasn't compatible with it. We used a regular GunCon instead, which worked perfectly fine. In any event, we will provide you with an update of the new build when we receive it.