FireStarter is pure nonsense. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. This run-and-gun shooter follows in the fine tradition of the Quake and Unreal Tournament series. While certainly not as good as those games, FireStarter mimics them by featuring a throwaway story, bizarre settings and enemies, tons of weapons, and buckets of blood. Don't expect cutscenes, scripted events, memorable characters, stealth missions, or careful tactics. Do expect nonstop, over-the-top violence where killing is your only goal, and killing is its own reward. FireStarter is rough around the edges, it's thematically incoherent, and it's a victim of feature creep, but along with fast-paced action, it has some interesting twists that give it a little depth.

Artifact abilities can make monsters attack one another.

Created by Ukrainian developer GSC Game World (Cossacks, Codename: Outbreak), FireStarter at least theoretically includes a story. As in the days of old, when shooter stories often boiled down to a few lines in a readme file, here you only learn the story--such as it is--from the game box. In the year 2010, a virus infects a virtual reality machine, called FireStarter, by trapping the player's conscious inside. To escape, you have to fight wave after wave of virtual monsters. The game opens with a slick-looking but wordless and incomprehensible movie that presumably is supposed to draw you into this whole virtual reality conceit.

The story never even appears in the game and really only seems like an excuse to throw you into a hodgepodge of settings where you'll face off against totally unrelated enemies like robots, zombies, demons, lizardlike aliens, and other staples of traditional shooters. One second a spiked metallic sphere the size of a basketball will be roaring down a hall after you. Then some humanoid in a trench coat will pop out from behind a pillar to try to burn you to a cinder with a flamethrower. As soon as you finish him off, a lumbering alien creature might march through a doorway and open up with a machine gun. Sadly, this diversity is only skin-deep. Rarely do you have to alter your tactics for different enemies. Just stand back, blast away, and you'll do fine.

FireStarter adds a tad more interest to the mix by offering six different character classes (with unique initial ratings for health, armor, and speed) as well as favored weapons and certain limitations. As you progress through the game's levels, you earn experience points by killing monsters and grabbing their glowing souls before they vanish. These points boost your core ability ratings and let you adopt and then boost special skills. These skills allow you to do things like carry heavy weapons without a movement speed penalty, carry extra ammo, or fall from great heights with limited damage. The character classes and skills don't radically alter the gameplay, but they add some variety and replay value to what's otherwise a very repetitive--if not downright monotonous--game.

The basic gameplay is pretty straightforward, though the clumsy manual and help screens (replete with broken English and typos) might lead you to believe otherwise. Playing either from a first- or third-person viewpoint, you progress through 16 levels that are grouped into four architectural themes. Each map is divided into zones that open up as you destroy waves of monsters that coalesce from thin air. Once you've opened all the zones and have killed off all the monsters, you beat the level. Then you upgrade your character (if you've earned enough experience points to reach the next character level). And then you move on to the next game level for more combat.

With his four hands, this character can fire two big guns at once.

Scattered across each level you'll find various weapons, ammo, health, and armor power-ups, which reappear after set time periods. That's standard stuff. What aren't standard are artifacts. Occasionally, a glowing object will appear, and you'll have a certain amount of time (depending on the difficulty setting) to nab it before it disappears. If you don't get to it in time--game over. If you do grab the artifact, it acts as a save point for quick loads, which is very handy since you can otherwise only save at the beginning of a level. Artifacts only appear in the most recently opened zone on the level, so you have to be careful about leaving that zone to get power-ups elsewhere because you may not be able to return in time.

To add to the potential confusion, "artifacts" also refer to special bonus powers that run on slowly recharging "psycho energy." As you acquire these over time, you gain neat abilities, like being able to teleport out of harm's way, turning invisible, or causing a monster to attack its allies.