Midway focused too hard on gore and mature appeal over good gameplay.
The concept behind Bio F.R.E.A.K.S. is that in the future America (known as Neo-America after the events) is pretty much no more after the government fell, stock markets crashed, all that kind of jazz, and the 50 states end up having series of civil wars against each other using their "F.R.E.A.K.S." Freaks (I'm already really tired of making that an acronym every time.) are what fight each other, and most of them look like humans with ridiculous weapons attached to limbs of their bodies. Overall, this is just a stupid story that seems more built for a lame, budget first person shooter.
Bio Freaks is played as a generic fighting game. Not really like Mortal Kombat, which you might expect from Midway after their War Gods was essentially the same as Mortal Kombat. This fighting game contains quite a bit of special moves you can do, like any other game of its kind, and it introduces flying in fight games. Yes, flying. I'm not exactly sure if this is the first game in the genre to try this, but let me ask you, do you need to fly in a fighting game? Seriously, in Bio Freaks it is nearly useless and since you have a meter that drains fast, you don't get much time to do any actual attacks while in the air. It just was not necessary.
Apart from the flying, Bio Freaks is focused on gore, it seems. You can tear off various limbs off your opponents. Think easy fatalities. Fatalities for dummies. The movement is too slow and the enemies sure like to use their shields a lot. Oh yeah, shields. Instead of a block button, pressing R1 and left on the directional pad will bring up a temporary shield. It lasts somewhat long and what's bad is that you can still attack with it up. Sure, that may sound good but the enemies use it a lot and they'll attack you too. This isn't much of a game where you can just button mash and win, but using strategy is almost as boring in Bio Freaks.
I will have to admit though, ripping off limbs so easily is very satisfying. But what otherwise would be a challenging game is made easy by playing as the character Bullzeye and pressing right, left, triangle next to the opponent. Bullzeye will rip off his opponents head in about a second or two, resulting in an instant death. Still, the gore effects are pretty amusing and the characters never seem to stop bleeding. One cool idea was having long range weapons in the game such as grenades and guns. I thought this was a cool feature that worked well enough in the game when the weapons, punches, and kicks were just too slow. Man, are they slow.
The basic fighting game menus are found here. Nothing is new, all the modes here have been seen a lot before, and far superior in a lot of other fighting games. When you turn on this garbage you'll be greeted by a lame intro that explains the story and then shows characters fighting each other in real time. Then go through some loading (which is not too long, but too frequent) and you'll be at the menu. You'll now see Arcade mode, VS. Battle, Time Attack, Survival, and Practice. Hey, aren't all those gameplay mode available in the far superior Tekken 3? Yeah, and Tekken 3 came out the same time as Bio Freaks! So if you were a fan of fighting games in 1998 and you picked Bio Freaks over Tekken 3, what were you thinking?
Now I am going to get into the visuals. The core game Bio Freaks actually is a decent looking game. While the animation is too slow, it's not choppy either and the character models, while stupid, at least look good from a technical standpoint. However, the character designs themselves, look like they were designed to appeal to elementary school kids into pseudo violent TV shows on Cartoon Network. In addition to all of that, all of the levels are too dim and the design is all too similar in all of the levels. There just isn't enough variety in the levels in Bio Freaks. The gore effects are not realistic by any means, but they sure are amusing and the fire effects and anything like that is decent.
The music is just weird in Bio Freaks. First of all, it seems to only play at certain times in the levels which I just never got. And secondly, it's just not fitting at all. I could have sworn I was listening to the music from Rusty Bucket Bay from the Rareware game Banjo Kazooie in one of the levels. Banjo Kazooie? That's a platformer, what is its music doing in a fighting game? The sound effects you'll hear are just the swooshes of kicking and punching the air or the thud of hitting at enemy. There are also the metal sounds with weapons and the moans and groans from the opponents, of course. Nothing too special.
It seems that Midway focused too hard on gore and mature appeal over good gameplay with Bio Freaks. From the minute I set eyes on Bio Freaks at the local video store for one dollar, I knew it was not going to be an impressive game. It is just one of those games where you immediately know whether it's good or not, and trust me, Bio Freaks is not good.
And what is up with the guy with the knife in his nipple?
Review Breakdown:
Gameplay: 3.0
Graphics: 6.0
Sound: 4.5
Value: 2.5
Overall: 3.5/10