Hybrid Heaven

"Horribly disappointing; disappointingly horrible"

Hybrid Heaven is about a secret service agent who is on a mission to rescue the president from aliens who have replaced him with an evil clone. While the story sounds like it could have been interesting, the game fails so badly in nearly every conceivable area that it doesn't even matter.

The control is completely unresponsive. Your character has little agility and moves about quite jerkily with an awkward jumping ability to boot. The battle system is a unique blend of real-time and turn based gameplay where you run around an arena and decide how to use a turn. Typically you can choose to attack (kick, hit, or special), evade, counter, or block, and you have very limited control over these functions once they are chosen.

That's not to say that the uniqueness saves it. In fact, battles usually amount to little more than 5 minutes or so of running in circles around your opponent while waiting for your stamina to fill back up so that you can hit with a single attack or combo.

Leveling up is also very unbalanced. The attributes that increase are mainly from what you attack with, so you can go through the entire game having a massively strong right leg and the rest of your body being weak. It's a fresh concept, but in practice it's ridiculous. The only nice aspect of this system is that individual body parts can be wounded and even rendered temporarily unavailable to fight with, which is actually a nice change in the real-time strategy. Still, you will get absolutely sick of battling enemy after enemy in such a repetitive manner with absolutely no reward.

Did they attempt to provide any sort of graphical atmosphere in this game? I couldn't really see past the horribly blurry and repetitive textures occupying every room. There is almost no difference between what one level looks like and the last. The environments are bare and mostly include one claustrophobic, flat-edged area after another. Your character model and key characters are dull, stereotypical, uninspired creations. Several of the monster designs are rather creative, surprisingly.

Sound is pathetic as well. Forgettable orchestrations consisting mainly of the usual melodramatic low-pitched ''wuhhhhhs''. The voice acting, thankfully left to the beginning and end cut scenes, is just as horribly implemented. Sound effects are your standard low-effort trash and are repeated throughout the entire game.

It's a shame, really; the background plot was potentially cool. Not long into the game, however, it all starts to fall apart; not that you'll care at that point anyway. You'll mainly be wondering how you managed to spend a dime on this garbage and why the hell Konami released it in the first place.

Good:

Nice Monster Designs

Bad:

Blurry Textures
Repetitive Environments
Droning Music and Sounds
Awkward Controls
Idiotic Battles
Unbalanced Attribute System
Absolutely Boring
Why, Konami?

Half-Integer Scale: 2.5
GameFAQs Scale: 3.0

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 01/26/02, Updated 01/26/02