Rex Blade: The Battle Begins Review

The tantalizing question is whether Simon & Schuster Interactive actually thought this was a good title.

When it comes to Rex Blade: The Battle Begins, the new first-person 3-D shooter from Simon & Schuster Interactive, the issue isn't whether it's a good game or not: It only takes a few minutes of play to see that it's woefully outdated in terms of graphics and gameplay. No, the tantalizing question is whether Simon & Schuster Interactive actually thought this was a good title, or if they picked it up for a song and figured they could muscle enough copies through retail to make a profit.

Set in the 36th century, the game puts you in the boots of Rex Blade, a cyborg originally developed hundreds of years ago to stop a revolt by all the other cyborgs who'd figured out they didn't need humans around anymore. Rex crushed the cyborg forces almost singlehandedly back then, and now he's been called up for duty once again, this time to stop a renewed cyborg invasion before it can be launched.

It's not Hugo-award material, but it's more than enough of an excuse to shoot everything that moves. Once the action starts, though, you'll probably decide to let the cyborgs win this battle by default.

I'll be the first to admit that gameplay always takes precedence over looks, but the block-o-rama graphics in Rex Blade are so weak that you'll have trouble concentrating on anything else. It doesn't help that the game only runs in 320x200x256, but you can't lay all the blame on the low resolution; several other, much older first-person shooters running at that res - Dark Forces, Doom, Descent - look far superior to this. The enemies you encounter are more laughable than frightening, and the scenery isn't much better. Aggravating the poor graphics are steep system requirements; I'd like someone to explain to me why a game that looks and plays like this requires a 100MHz Pentium for optimal performance.

Poor graphics are one thing, but the game lacks other features, too. There's no option to customize the keyboard commands, the very first thing I do when loading any first-person 3D shooter (I hate using CTRL as the fire button). Come on, Simon & Schuster - this is a de facto feature of any self-respecting PC action title! While you can jump up and crouch down, you're not able to look up or down, nor does the game support the mouse as a control device - the method of choice for many fans of 3-D shooters.

Joysticks and gamepads are supported, but there are no instructions on which buttons do what, and there's no way to assign actions to buttons. You can strafe by holding down the Alt key and using a directional arrow, but there's no way to strafe Right/Left with a single button as in Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, or SkyNET.

The sound effects do more to grate on your nerves than create any sense of apprehension or drama - you have to hear them to appreciate how annoying they can become. And the manual is little more than an afterthought, devoid of illustrations or any type of explanations of the weapons and objects you'll find in the game.

As you explore the cyborg installation, you're able to "hack" into the computer system to access log files and libraries, play video games (the only one I tried was an Asteroids clone called StarBlazer), and even write real programs using REX++, a "fully functional cyborg programming language" according to the box. I never found the password to use REX++, but that's okay - I don't play these kinds of games for a chance to do programming in BASIC, and I'll bet not many other action hounds do, either. (Note: I don't know for sure that it's BASIC, but it looked and smelled like it to me.)

In the end, about the only thing Rex Blade has going for it is its price - a relatively low $29.99 direct from Simon & Schuster Interactive, around half the price of big-name titles. But as the old saw goes, you get what you pay for - and for a game with such dated graphics, spartan gameplay options, and no support for any type of multiplayer game, $29.99 is actually a little on the high side. That should change in a few months, though, when copies of this game start piling up in the bargain bins of software retailers all around the country.

The Good

  • N/A

The Bad

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