RLH: Run Like Hell

"Run Like Hell... away from this game."

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this game is pure and utter crap. There's simply a bug I will get to in a little while that explains my rating, and drives a nail in the coffin.

The game starts out modestly enough. You're a military man on a space station doing some kind of mineral work or something; I wasn't really paying attention to some of the dialogue. You've got coworkers who are either human or fat reptile alien things. Oh, except for your comrade-in-arms; he's kind of like Predator, if Predator lost all his neat gadgets, could speak English, and didn't want to slaughter every human being in a five-mile radius.

Nevermind that, though; this game can really play with your nerves with both fair and illogical scare tactics. At its fairest, enemies come around corners you haven't explored yet, surprise you when you come back to areas you've already been to earlier, and chase you while you are charged with doing something simple like running left and right or tapping the X button fast enough to force open a door. At its strangest, enemies will fall from a completely black (And unviewable when looking up) ceiling in quantities ranging anywhere from one to ten, or damage you without actually attacking you (Preferring instead to simply touch you like an old NES baddie).

The game supposedly has three types of aliens: Brutes, Cutters, and Scorpions (I think). I encountered the first two quickly enough, but due to that bug I mentioned before, I never got to actually fight the third. Don't worry, I'll get to that soon. Anyway, the Cutters are simply clones of the little black aliens from Alien, so they're easy enough to kill since they're the most common. Brutes, on the other hand, are semi-invincible juggernauts that require special things like explosions or bigger explosions to kill them.

But when you don't have explosions on your side, what do you have to fight off the Cutters? Well, you at least get an assault rifle, which I chose to max out with every modchip for damage I could find. It worked pretty well, following the traditional style of "put more of these into me so I can make things fall down sooner than before." No complaints on that or the items, although the idea of using Bawls energy drinks and protein bars as healing items seems a bit asinine to me considering this is a futuristic space station. Eh, maybe it explains why everybody can't stop walking around long enough to do anything useful.

So, what was that bug I mentioned? It's the only thing more likely to eat you than the killer aliens: a room. I went into a security room of some kind which had two force field-blocked doorways behind which loomed a Cutter apiece (Ah, wit!). Naturally, I had to lower the force fields to get into those rooms, so after I healed my post-Cutter wounds by cramming my face with protein bars, I went into the room on the right, which seemed to contain a metal shelf and a pulsing fleshy wall thing. When I entered the room, the screen started blinking black, and I assumed it was a lighting-effect-ambush script of some sort. I tried to get Nicky out of the room to get ready for some action, but then I couldn't see anymore. I waited about two seconds, and when I heard nothing slicing into Nick's supple, polygon-addled body, I tried rotating the camera around. Well, I found him, but now he was in a black void outside of the security room I first entered. I was able to walk around a bit inside this void, but trying to go back to the doorway I entered the room from, or any doorway or actual real space, however, yielded an invisible wall I could not pierce. I tried firing, I tried running aimlessly, I tried running along the invisible force field, nothing worked. I tried to see if the vaunted "checkpoints" the game claimed to be saving were accessible, but sadly they were not. I'm guessing you either have to die to access the most recent, or they were simply trying to give me a false sense of security.

So, there you have it. A cliche horror game that, while it could get good later on for all I know, threw me away from completing it with a bug that should have been easy to fix if the crew making the game had bothered to play-test it. And so, the game ended not with a bang, but with a funny black wall-void.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 09/25/07

Game Release: RLH: Run Like Hell (US, 09/27/02)