Very good at what it does.
The game starts out pretty slowly. You play as Parker, a miner on Mars, working for a company called Ultor. The miners are exploited, overworked and underpaid, living in miserable conditions, ill-treated by the guards and facing a lifelong service in extremely tough conditions.
A small group of rival miners decide to revolt when a plague breaks lose killing miners. You inadvertently become a part of the revolt against the corporation that doesn’t care whether you live or die, as long as you are getting their work done.
We don’t get to see socialist upraising in games all that often. Of course, there are a few mutants and zombies thrown in, but that only breaks the routine. For most part of the game, you battle against guards and mercenaries or Ultor.
I got the feeling that the game tried to be something like Half Life. Somehow the visuals look very similar and you get to ride the tram more than once in the game, you have a space suit that is very similar to the hazard suit in Half Life!
The visuals are very good. The graphics capture the atmosphere of the red planet very well and you get the feeling of being a part of something truly out of this world. I did experience frame rate drops a few times, but that isn’t a problem.
You get to drive a few vehicles in the game, like a Submarine and other land vehicles. I thought this part could have been a little better. For most time, the vehicles are pretty slow to respond, but since the enemy vehicles are slow as well, it doesn’t leave you a disadvantage. Had the vehicles handled better, the action in the game would have been a whole lot intense.
There are tons of weapons to be used in the game, like assault rifle, precision rifle, sniper rifle, rocket launcher and others. As the game progresses, you get to use better weapons, and consequently the enemies get a lot tougher. But they are not very intelligent, they tend to come in packs, just fire at them Rambo style with your heavy machine gun, and you’ll finish them off in no time.
However, towards the end there are some mercenaries using rail guns, and they can kill you in one shot, and they tend to be quite accurate as well. This part is challenging and a lot of fun to play. Using your rail gun to aim on a mercenary far off just as he tries to get an aim on you can be pretty intense. There are quite a few such rail gun duals towards the end of the game.
Now, probably for the first time in games, we have truly destructible environments. Using certain weapons, like rocket launchers, remote charges you can destroy walls etc. This is a lot of fun to use, although it is very primitive in the way it’s implemented.
The audio in the game is good, no complaints here, although the constant screaming of scientists and other non-hostile NPCs when they see you carrying your weapons can be irritating, but otherwise, the sound is solid, and the music, when it plays, also adds to the thrill at times.
My final verdict – standard FPS fare, that doesn’t deviate much from the generic formula and for a good reason. The geo mod technology is an interesting feature, pity it wasn’t implemented more often.
Worth playing.