No licking or touching allowed as you run through the trap laden environments. |
Illbleed's dialogue and voice acting border on terrible. Erico and her friends say some utterly stupid things. I have a feeling Crazy Games wanted the characters to sound hip and cool, so that gamers could relate to them. Well, the writing features some the most ridiculous use of slang I've ever heard in a game. Not that I've never used the phrases, "I'm down with that!" and "For real?" but they just sound so forced and out of place in this game. Not to mention the fact voices they've chosen are pretty ridiculous. Your cohort Randy's voice sounds like a mixture of the stereotypical "Californian surfer dude" and Keanu Reeves after a few too many pints of Guinness. I guess I should mention that survival-horror games aren't known for their voice acting, and, in all honesty, the acting in this game is probably no worse than that heard in Resident Evil: Code Veronica. Still, it's worth mentioning.
Unfortunately the dialogue isn't the main problem you will encounter in Illbleed. The game suffers from a few major control problems and camera issues. The main issue I have with the control is basic movement. You see, to make your move in the game, you just have to press in the direction you want to go. Sounds fine, right? Sure, but the difference between whether you are running or walking comes not from how far in one direction you have the stick pushed, but how hard you pushed it in the first place. So, if you slam the stick up, your character will run forward. If you press it up softly, she will walk, even if the stick is pressed as far up as it can go. This may not sound like a major problem, but it means that you have to stop to change the speed that you are moving. It also causes major problems in fights. If you are attacked, you'll probably be holding the analog stick in some direction so that you can run away from the enemy. After your character slumps back after an attack, she will only walk, not run, away from the enemy. This is because you were already holding the stick. It's annoying -- trust me. Luckily, in battle you can use your "dodge" technique to make sure that no attack affects you, even if it clearly hits you. Yeah, that's pretty fair. Not to mention the fact that jumping in the game is ridiculous. The animation looks stupid and your character gets frozen in position for a moment after she lands, making her immovable. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if there weren't large sections of the game -- like the first level boss for example -- where you are required to jump from platform to platform while dodging enemy attacks. It should have been fixed. While movement for most of the game is fine, in battle, it's pretty terrible. The same can be said of the camera. In battle, the once free moving camera becomes locked in one position. While you can attempt to use the game's auto-lock feature to target an enemy, sometimes you get lost behind an object and have no idea where you're going. Then when you try to run out from behind it, you end up just walking... I think you get my point.
Did he "$#!T with fear" to death from playing Illbleed? Probably not. |
I found the game's menu interface a bit clunky as well. It seems that every four seconds while playing Illbleed, I had to either check my map or use an item. The map is accessed by the "Y" button and the menu with the item screen is triggered by the "Start" button. The fact that you have to check them so often seems like a problem in the first place. It can get even more obnoxious when you accidentally hit "Y" when you wanted to use an item. Because you hit the wrong button you have to wait for the map to load, then the game to load, then the item menu to load when you finally find the right button. With all that loading, it's no wonder the levels take so long to complete.
The menus aren't the only things that add to the constant stop-and-go aspect of gameplay. You see, to get through every room, you have to stop, use your Horror Monitor, place marks, and then proceed to check everything out. The action is slowed down to the point where it actually feels like you're playing a game of 3D-Horror-Minesweeper. If a trap hurts you, you'll end up hitting "Y" so that you can use a healing item.... This could be rather boring to someone expecting as much action as you'd find in a Resident Evil game.
Also worth mentioning is the game's framerate. It sticks around 60 for most of the game, but in certain occasions, it does slow down quite a bit. I noticed that it would sometimes feel as low as 15 frames per second when there was a lot of onscreen action. This could have probably been worked out with more testing. Thus, more testing should have been done!
I expected Illbleed to be terrible. Just one look at the trailer, which told me that the game would make me "$#!t with fear" and I was sure that it was just going to be some awful Resident Evil knock-off. To my surprise, the game had enough fresh ideas to keep me interested for a little while. I was lured in by not only the gameplay, but also the campy, B-movie atmosphere that had made me wary in the first place. Unfortunately, control and camera issues, and the strange stop-n-go gameplay that Illbleed sports may be too annoying to make people want to endure the game's six levels. If you can get past those problems, then you may find something that is actually pretty enjoyable.
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