Abadox: The Deadly Inner War

"Aside from those pesky numbers and Japanese titles, this is the first game if you go alphabetically. Wow. Cool, eh? Not really, I know.. It's not bad."

Abadox is basically a compilation of every other space shooting game made before it, scrolling or otherwise. If you're ever played Life Force, Gradius, R-Type, or any of those other games, this will look like a cheap knock-off, which it is. It's not overly horrible, but it's not awesomely great, either. A bad ox, perhaps? Bwahahaha... *rimshot* Anyway, there are two modes of flight: The standard side scrolling, which I call ''R-Type Mode'' and the vertical scrolling. The rules are simple, if anything touches you aside from a powerup, you die. And when you die, you're sent all the way back to the beginning of the level. It sucks doing all that work to get up to a boss, only to get hit by a stray bullet and have to work your way back up to him. I hate when games do that... Oh well. The graphics are... interesting, to say the least. In the first level, you're flying over what look like intestines. Wow, that's pretty normal... I thought we were killing aliens, not taking a tour of the digestive system. It's a pretty tough game, since you have to dodge a LOT of things, and since lives/continues are scarce, you need to be very good to beat this game. Time for the breakdown..

Graphics: 5/10
Intestines. Well, they don't look too bad.. everything else is par graphically, but they did score a double bogey with some of the enemies. Still, it could've been better, in my opinion.

Audio: 4/10
The music didn't do it's job. I'm guessing it was supposed to be some sort of dark, foreboding music. I found it to be dull and... well, bad. The sounds aren't very good either. Just mute it and blast some Slayer or something, that's what I do.

Challenge: 8/10
It's pretty damn hard to dodge everything and still be able to kill things. The powerups do help, but only the speed and the shield thing. The guns are worthless. The 3-way shot is the worst, since you can only fire one at a time (meaning only one can be on screen..) That just adds to the challenge, I guess.

Gameplay: 6/10
The controls are decent, and although the guy does move slow in the beginning, you get powerups that make him faster. It both helps and hurts though, since the added speed means you can inadvertently run into a wall or enemy. It's alright though, just avoid anything that's moving.

Overall: 5/10
It's ok. Just a basic run of the mill space shooter with a crappy story and intestines. I don't condone the use of emulators (piracy is bad, mmmkay) but if you do happen to use one, save states would be your life saver in this game. Cheats would be good too, but the true enjoyment comes from playing the game legitimately. In other words, go to Funcoland or whatever your local used games store is, and buy it. It's probably like $1.39 or less, so even if you don't like it, you're not shelling out big dollars...

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 06/12/02, Updated 06/12/02