Vivisector: Beast Within

""To go on two legs is very hard. Perhaps four is better, anyway.""

If there's something I've learned from watching and reading reviews on bad TV shows, movies, video games, comics, etc., over the past couple of months, it's that "bad" doesn't always mean "unenjoyable". As long as there's a sense of accomplishment and fun to be had in a medium, the technical aspects of it could suck rock salt through its open wounds, and no one would give a damn. This is the case of Vivisector: Beast Within, an Ukrainian PC FPS based around, if anything, the Orson Wells novel "The Island of Dr. Moreau"; technically, everything about this piece of work is substandard - sometimes laughably so - yet it still proves to be mindless fun...emphasis on the mindless.

Let's take a look at the basics of this game, to show you just what I mean:

Story: The story is forgettable, and has a lot of plot holes and discontinuity to it. You are Kurt, a soldier sent with a squadron lead by your former love interest to Soreo Island to extract another team that got stuck there. However, your team gets slaughtered, and it turns out you were brought there by the general assigned to the island to help him control a race of cybernetically-enhanced animal men he commissioned a local scientist to create as the perfect soldiers, but has since rebelled against his tyrannical rule. Several characters are established then quickly abolished from the plot, only to show back up again as a sort of deus ex machina near the end of the game; the love interest, for instance, is supposedly killed during the opening cut scenes, but is later found alive and pregnant with Kurt's child in the scientist's lab near the end, having supposedly had her child injected with animal DNA. Between those two points, she is virtually forgotten by the plot, so her showing back up comes right out of freaking nowhere.

Another huge point of contention in the story is their attempt to build up suspense by making you wonder which side you're on. This is done by making both human and anthromorph alike your enemies. The problem is, there's little reason for them to do this; The humans are attacking you, because you're not authorized to be on the island, which makes no sense if the general specifically brought you over there to help him deal with the animals, yet the animals are attacking you, because they're preprogrammed to see ALL humans as the enemy, regardless if they really are, which makes no sense when Kurt switches sides to the animals, especially when he's brought over to their side by their leader, Lion. In short, you're shot at by both sides of this conflict, no matter which side you're on, at the time, and there's just no justification for it, making Kurt's defection little more than a chore. Oh, and before I forget, even if they DID form a distinction between you joining either side, this quickly becomes moot near the end, when the general calls out his own batch of loyal human/animal hybrids, essentially mean you'd be fighting human and animal alike REGARDLESS. Not only does this cause a huge discrepancy with the whole point of the plot, but it also introduces some unneeded and unfair game difficulty.


Gameplay: The controls of this game are fairly solid; your movements are smooth and the rate of gunfire is accurate and consistent. The kill ratio of those weapons, however, aren't; this is a failing in the game's touted "vivisection point", a standard in enemy ragdoll physics that allows you to literally flay the flesh from your opponent's bones or splatter their gibbed bodies over half a county. Y'see, despite how awesome it looks, the creators of this game didn't implement it very well, meaning damage that LOOKS like kill shots, well...aren't. There will be many times when you play this game where you scalp an opponent to the skull, expose their entire ribcage, and practically skinned them alive to their skeleton, and they'll just. Keep. Coming. In fact, the only way to guarantee the opponent goes down in a couple of shots is to go with either one of the rocket launchers at your disposal (which gib any enemy on contact, but only if hit dead center), or with the unusually-lethal sniper rifles (both of which can kill with one shot at practically any part of the enemy's body).

This proves to be a big problem when you couple it with the RPG-like elements in this game; through different actions, either exploring hidden alcoves or blowing up the enemies in a particular way (like getting more than one in a shot, killing them in succession, or gibbing them), you earn points that you can cash in at various points along the game to upgrade various stats, including speed, accuracy (in general or for particular weapons), stamina, etc. Unfortunately, the amount of points needed to perform these upgrades is outrageous, and with out dodgy the weapons are in their killing power, it'll be rare that you'll be able to get the bonuses you need to earn enough points (not like it would matter, anyway; the amount of points you get per bonus never goes above 50 or so, and the lowest amount of points needed to make your first upgrade is 2100).

There's also the problem of enemy placement; as I said earlier, they bring in some majorly unfair fake difficulty by having you pointlessly fight both human and animal enemies at the same time, but they compound that difficulty by deliberately leading you into ambush after ambush and leaving you as a sitting duck for these enemies. There is virtually no warning given as to where an enemy is or when you're going to engage them; the humans don't make a sound when you approach them, while the animals more often than not TELEPORT in, leaving you no room to react to their presence before they're on you. Even worse, these encounters are ALWAYS set up so your forced to gun them down in an open clearing with little to no cover and, sometimes, even caging you in so you can't move around and dodge the opponent's projectiles. You are literally stranded in a sea of hostile, irritatingly tough opponents armed with unreliable weapons, and told to kill them all before they kill you. This is not fair, and this is not how a good FPS is supposed to work. Take Doom, for example; enemy placements are such that you have proper cover to take advantage of, and they won't be able to surprise you unless you rush in recklessly, something that's hard to do when you can clearly hear them coming for you from behind the wall or door you're hiding yourself behind. This provides strategy for how to approach any given area, allowing you to sneak up on enemies, snipe them from afar, or rush in to create enough of a diversion to cause some infighting. Not so here; you're practically forced to enter a "run and gun" attitude in order to survive, diving into the action in order to slaughter as many of them as you can...which ironically will more often than not get you killed, since the enemies here are RELENTLESS and love to swarm you over and over again, and also have much more accurate weapons than you ever will, meaning you're constantly at a disadvantage throughout the game. How is this fun? And this is true for ALL FOUR DIFFICULTY LEVELS. There is NO DIFFERENCE in enemy count, placement, or difficulty in ANY of the four difficulty modes that I've been able to see.

Also, while you can get points for exploration, and it certainly seems like you can go nearly anywhere in the vast, huge landscapes in this game...you really can't; obvious traps are set up so you HAVE to trigger them to progress, as trying to go around them will only lead you to impassable mountain ranges or invisible walls where you should be able to climb onto. Not only that, but despite all that open space, there's hardly anything to FILL that space that will make exploring worthwhile; almost every hidden area I've encountered either had absolutely nothing in them, or a smattering of ammo and health packs to reward you for your hard work. In fact, it seems like the developers of this game were expecting the player to explore, as at least two of the "hidden" areas I've found in the game were RIGHT NEXT to where I needed to go, out in the open and clearly visible. At one point, the game has you exploring a downed military cargo plane, and WALKING OFF THE PLANE ON THE SIDE OF IT THAT YOU HAVE TO GO TO REACH THE NEXT CHECKPOINT gets you an exploration bonus. What the hell?

Speaking of health and ammo, they're really stingy with it, here; both are situated right next to where the enemy's going to be, and there's so little of both that the game actually TELEPORTS IN MORE after a wave of enemies, just to compensate, and even then, it's only enough that, if you hadn't wasted enough health and ammo firing wildly at the enemies in a futile attempt to kill them, you MAY be able to survive the next wave. Eventually, you'll encounter crates full of ammo and health, which is good, but here's the problem; they show up very erratically, and YOU NEED TO WASTE BULLETS JUST TO OPEN THEM UP. That's right; in order to gain what's inside the crates, you need to shoot the living bejeezus out of them in order to crack open a hole big enough to dig out what you need from inside. That's just ridiculous. And it HAS to be bullets; bombs, rockets, and other ammo just won't do a dent in them, despite the fact that they're wooden crates built around a metal cage. That's logic for you, huh? Oh, and you can pick the crates up and throw them by using the action command. How random is that? At what point are you going to be so desperately out of ammo that you're going to have to throw a box at your opponent to do damage? And must I say it? This is the ONLY way to get ammunition; your enemies do NOT drop any ammo or health items when you kill them, and you can't acquire their weapons, even though you can see the weapons sliding down the hillside away from their fresh corpse.

I'm really sorry for going on and on about this, but it really is the lowlight of the game; it's unfathomable how a game with such fluid game controls and a wide array of weapons and enemies would get so much about how to utilize them. It really feels like the game is demanding that you cheat in order to get through it.


Sound: The sounds are rather decent for this game; the weapons sound like they should, the animal sounds are accurate, and the ambient noise between enemy encounters ups the anticipation (and paranoia) of the player. The music that is played during a battle is...iffy. The songs are all a combination of heavy metal and industrial techno, and while they do raise the anxiety feel of the battles, they just don't have any memorability to them. The voice acting is hit and miss, as well; while a few characters like Lion have good voice acting, most of the characters are meh at best, with Kurt and his love interest coming across as bored and uninspired. Overall, the sounds in this game won't distract you, but they aren't inspired, either.


Graphics: This is practically the only saving grace of this game. The enemies, in a word, are gorgeous; the human enemies are well-designed and have decent armor, while the beasts are a wonder in fur rendering. The vivisection gimmick, while severely flawed as a gameplay mechanic, is very appealing aesthetically; while not entirely realistic, the gore is splattered very nicely, with areas of the body disintegrating with pinpoint accuracy. Unfortunately, even then, it's not entirely free of inconsistency; gibbing an enemy can be hard or easy, depending on the weapon, and the weapon needed to gib them isn't consistent; a higher-powered shotgun, for example, could barely scratch an enemy, while your basic knife can chop up an opponent's dead corpse like it was nothing. Also, since this game was released only in the Ukraine and Germany, and since only the German version is really available for people willing to get their hands on it, that means the game is censored to prevent the human enemies from being perforated; you need a patch to restore it to the original violence.

The level designs are also pretty impressive, at least from a distance; the areas are vast (even though they ARE empty and don't encourage exploration), and have many tiers and constructs that make them very distinct from one-another. The problem is that the wide open spaces are really disorienting; the textures for the rock outcroppings blend together from any distance, making judging which areas you can climb onto and which ones you can't extremely difficult, and as I said before, the game has invisible walls to keep you on a certain path, so even if it LOOKS like you can climb on top of something, it doesn't necessarily mean you CAN. It's also annoying when you've got random niches in the walls and cul-de-sacs that look like they'd be important, but only lead to dead ends. Overall, they're not bad, and they do give a sense of atmosphere and being in a huge, wide-open island, but they just don't DO anything with the space allotted to them. Oh, and let's not get into the clipping issues; there are several areas in the game where, if you're not careful, you or the enemies could slip right through the seams of the level and fall into oblivion (or at least a pit you can't get out of). There's been patches for this, but it's still a problem.

So, with all of these problems plaguing the game, how can I recommend this for the curious? Well, you've got to take things into perspective; while the enemy placement and difficulty is atrociously unfair, the sheer variety in them and the ways you can vivisect them yourself makes it VERY satisfying when you DO survive an onslaught, and wade through the gristle of a dozen dozen enemy soldiers in victory. The storyline, while fraught with plot holes, is still interesting in its premise, and some of the character interaction is genuinely intriguing (especially those between Kurt and Lion). And, it's worth it to see the sheer awesomeness of the animal enemies. This game really screams for a multiplayer mode, but sadly, this is the game's final failing; it's a completely solo effort. While I know the storyline enforces that, GoldenEye had a solo storyline, too, and it found a way to incorporate multiplayer. They can't even argue that the battlefields would be "too big", since this was made during a time where Team Fortress 2 and other squad-based shooters were at their prime; just imagine how awesome a Human vs. Beast squad battle would've been.

Bottom line: this game is a curiosity, one worth checking out if you want a mindless shooter. Just don't expect Doom or Counterstrike here, as you'll be sorely disappointed.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/23/09

Game Release: Vivisector: Beast Within (EU, 01/05/06)