A quirky and fun game - flawed, yet fun and fascinating!
Background:
Relentless is a story about Twinsen, a cartooney-looking young man with a robe and a pony tail, who appropriately lives on a planet with twin-suns, one by each pole. A ring of mountains and ice make up the arctic-like regions, while the poles are home to temperate and desert climates. But not all is well, as an evil doctor plans his schemes for world domination... or worse! Twinsen must discover his forgotten family heritage in an effort to sabotage the plans of the evil doctor and save the world, not to mention his girlfriend.
Yes, in many ways, it's a cliched plot and sounds like it could be a template for any RPG, but how it plays out is far from normal. It has a flavor and quirkiness all its own, in a cartooney, colorful-yet-sometimes-dark and fully-realized world.
Gameplay:
Relentless plays like a cross between Zelda, the Metal Gear Solid series, Combat (yes, from the old Atari days), and more standard item-collection/item-puzzle adventure games. Why so varied and eccentric? Well, much of the game is based on four different behavior modes, and your action button will change its action based on these modes: interactive (gathering items, talking, etc.), athletic (can run quickly as you move and jump over platformer-style gaps), aggressive (can fight with your fists/head in a drunken-monkey style seizure-boxing), and stealth (tiptoe as you move and duck to hide).
It's like Zelda in that much of the game involves real-time exploration and combat, conversations and clues, etc. If you want to figure out how to solve the next puzzle, look around and talk to people.
It's like Metal Gear Solid in that stealthy tactics are a big part of the gameplay. Combat is often difficult in this game, and a lone single enemy can often kill you if you're not careful. Your best bet much of the time is to avoid enemies whenever possible. And when you can't sneak past them, running past them at full speed can work too!
It's like Combat in the way that you move and fight. Left and Right keys control not your movement, but the angle that Twinsen faces. Up and Down move forwards and backwards. Although this control scheme became more common with time (a certain survival-horror series used it too, I believe), it was fairly uncommon for its time in an adventure game.
And like many adventure games, collecting crazy items to advance is part of the gameplay. Despite combat, it's an adventure game to the core.
A note about the combat... While fun, it can also be frustrating. Much of it involves meleeing your opponent with your bare hands or sword (if you can get close enough) or throwing a Magic Ball at him. You can choose different throwing angles for throwing while behind obstacles or making bank-shots from around corners by changing Twinsen's behavior mode. But it is hard. A single shotgun-toting guard is more than capable of killing you on the spot because ever time you're hit, you'll briefly lose control as you reel backwards. This gives the guard an opening for another shot at you, which you'll likely take the brunt of. It's often enough to kill you if you're attacked a single time, since each hit sets you up to take another. Even if you happen to get out of the vicious cycle, perhaps by reeling behind an obstacle for cover, then you still have lost much more HP than feels fair and still may have no way of making it out alive.
A cheater's method (but far less frustrating) is to stop and reload the game when you are hit, since the game autosaves at the beginning of each new screen. That way, you have a chance at starting that area over without getting into the infinite damage loop. It may be that the designers intended the game to work this way, to make your adventure seem more perilous and increase your reliance on stealth. But sometimes, it doesn't feel fair. So feel free to cheat right back.
So what kinds of things will you do? Travel the world on foot and (non-interactive) vehicles, search for hidden secrets and items, sneak into military compounds, sabotage genetics labs, while fighting off shotgun-toting guards, skeletons, mutated monsters, and the evil doctor himself. You'll also spend some time escaping from jail, repeatedly! There's a jail in just about every town that you visit and finding ways to get arrested (and to subsequently escape) is one of the quirkiest, funniest things you can do in the game. It's all a great deal of fun if you're into quirky adventure games and have a great deal of patience for the sometimes difficult combat.
The places where the game fails is in the difficulty in combat, the occasionally awkward controls and perhaps a few bugs now and then that get you stuck on a jumping puzzle.
Graphics:
The graphics are unique in that they are mostly SVGA (VESA under DOS) iso-metric environments. The graphics of these areas are in pre-rendered 3D, and you have full maneuverability (within your limitations) to explore them, up and down stairs, under bridges, around behind, etc.
However, the characters, the inventory screen, and the world map screen (shown when traveling from one area to another) use a real-time 3D engine, which makes Twinsen, townspeople, and guards look very simple, yet fluid. This has its own unique charm. It could be better, but for the era Relentless was released and the unique style of the game, it is excellent.
The combination of realtime 3D characters on prerendered 3D backgrounds was quite new at the time, but later became popular with a little game for PlayStation called Final Fantasy VII.
Finally, there are a number of pre-rendered CGI sequences for major story points and jail escapes. And the less said about that the better, for fear of spoiling some of the most rewarding and entertaining points of the story and the game's humor. In all, the sequences aren't the highest resolution, but they are charming and well-worth their placements.
Sound:
Because of technical problems in getting sound to work, I was never able to hear sound effects. Because of this, I have dropped the score of the game. Much of the fault lies in the pre-Windows 9x days of DOS and balancing free conventional memory with correct drivers and compatibility issues. But it was a real problem, and I feel a bit cheated, even though I'm not sure who's to blame.
However, the music is excellent. It comes in and out at certain points. It's not omnipresent, but very effective at setting the mood in certain points of the game. From the light, upbeat in the town theme to the military march led by the rolling snare drums, from the haunting music in the icy area to the sneaky violins as you sneak through the suburbs, it's all CD-quality sound with an orchestral quality that is instantly recognizable and likeable. And when I say CD-quality, I mean literally from the CD. You can take the CD-ROM and play the excellent soundtrack in a standard CD player (from tracks 2 on, as track one is a data track containing the game).
Value:
Relentless is an adventure game. It was compelling enough to me to make me play through it multiple times, a real feat in my experience that can only be said of a few single-player adventure/role playing games. In fact, writing about it makes me nostalgic, and makes me wonder if I can play it under today's operating systems (I rather doubt so, but I wouldn't be deterred from trying).
A multiplayer mode might have been interesting, but isn't necessary. The only reason I bring it up is because we assume that any new game today should have it, but it wasn't necessary for its time and isn't now. It's a great single-player experience and nothing more.
Overall, Relentless is a weird game, but fun (and yes, a "Classic") if you have the patience for it.