07/12/01

                                    Illbleed

System : Dreamcast

Price : 29.95 at Game Hits

Genre : Survival Horror

Before you write this game off as another RE-style survival clone, know this. Illbleed is almost nothing like a conventional survival horror game, except for all the blood.

For starters, Illbleed doesn't really have a ton of monsters to fight, nor does it have lots of massive weaponry laying about. Illbleed's main claim to fame is that it is going to try to scare the bejeezus out of you and it more than likely will at one time or another.

The story behind Illbleed is that 4 high school students receive invitations to the world's most deadly amusement park: Illbleed, run and funded by eccentric multi-billionaire producer, Michael Reynolds (who we are pretty sure is IN NO WAY related to Pat Reynolds...pretty sure.). His challenge stands as this: Anyone who can completely get through all 6 parts of Illbleed will receive an absolutely ludicrous amount of $100,000,000.00 cash on arrival. The problem? Seemingly thousands have tried and have all DIED. Not too much of a downer, right?

What separates Illbleed from the likes of Resident Evil, Dino Crisis and (shudder) Evil Dead : Hail to the King is that it focuses more on trying to frighten you than trying to have you battle it out with the forces of the undead/nature. In the game, not only do you have to keep track of your health, you have to keep track of your heart rate, level of bleeding and adrenaline levels. Too high of a heart rate will cause fainting and sometimes death from shock and you can very well bleed to death.

And does stuff ever try to scare you. Lots of creepy crawlie stuff comes at you in little events called Shock Events, sometimes literally having stuff crawl out of the walls and will make even the most veteran horror gamers give off some reflex. From the disturbing (a scream followed by body parts falling into a mine cart) to the silly (a dismembered pig's butt flies up and farts brown gas in your face) to the funny (Blue Stinger's Dogs Bower falls out of a ventilation shaft and dies in a pool of his blood), it's a mix of both scary and screwy.

Well, what defense do you have against these Shock Events? Two things, really. The Four Senses Sensor and the Horror Monitor. The Four Senses Sensor is a device that allows you to tell what your character is "sensing" around him/her by either Smelling, Seeing, Hearing or feeling through their "Sixth Sense", which usually has nothing to do with you seeing dead people. Since it doesn't work all that well when you're running, you have to take the game at a deliberately slower pace, so the impatient gamer who's looking for nothing more than a shoot-em-up fest should look elsewhere. The Horror Monitor allows you to get a clue to seeing the location of Shock events beforehand and marking them so you don't get blasted by a bloodbath or a bed of cockroaches. But you have to use it sparingly because it feeds off of your adrenaline. Illbleed is a constant balancing act, but rarely does it ever get dull.

The graphics are actually pretty good. The stuff they throw at you is great and for the most part is somewhat frightening looking while maintaining the campiness of the game. There is some stuff that may offend the weak-hearted, but pretty much nothing that hasn't been on FOX already, but this is a M-rated game for a reason. The environments all look great and help to pull you into the level you're in. Honestly, the only thing that doesn't look right is the ladder that drops down during battle sequences for a rescue. Since when do ladders go THROUGH ceilings?

Soundwise is a place really to be afraid of because the voice acting is just about as bad as the voice acting in Blue Stinger. It honestly is better than Blue Stinger's, but it is still quite bad. It seems to have some of the same voice actors and that is NOT a good thing. It tends to be better later in the game, but as a whole still really bad. To see what I mean, the end of stage 2, "The Revenge Of The Queen Worm", has an absolutely hideous dialogue between a dead man's spirit and his adoptive "daughter", a gigantic worm. This is not a joke. Music and sound effects are thankfully much better, with catchy mood enhancing music and nice effects all around.

Control isn't terribly bad, but has two glaring problems. Jumping, for lack of a better term, sucks Unbelievably Big Goat(TM). The awful jumping is made worse by the fact that the camera won't cooperate at times and will take FOREVER to swing around to where you can see what you're doing. You don't jump around that often and it doesn't happen a lot, but it's still irritating. And secondly is the battle scene camera that is stuck on a fixed location. Like the jumping, all I can say is that they probably should have tweaked this more. When the fights get into the background, it can be extremely hard to see things, especially if an enemy is obscuring your view. Also, in terms of gameplay it isn't bad, but how many people can dodge a flame, while it's hitting them, by sidestepping and grunting a little? The dodge button seems to fit into the whole cheesiness of the game, so I guess it not that criticizable.

All in all, Illbleed REALLY surprised me. I was expecting something like Blue Stinger and ended up playing something that is completely different than all the survival horror games out there. It has moments where it will REALLY piss you off because of stupid jumping\camera or trying to find the hiding place of something really lame. But for the most part, it is an enjoyable experience and surprisingly, a pretty good for a laugh too.

The Reverend Mofat Jones' "Sixth Sense" has nothing to do with him seeing bacon double cheeseburgers. Honest.

-Mofat

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