Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy

"A good game with a great concept"

When I saw a preview for Psi-Ops in The Suffering I knew I wanted to play it. The idea was just so great I couldn't believe anyone hadn't already thought of it, you play as a commando with psychic powers. Sweet huh? Plus I was surprised at how good The Suffering was and I was hoping Midway had made another extremely violent but also very good game after the long series of average games they'd been making for several years. For the most part the game delivers but unfortunately it has a very irritating set of flaws. Anyway onto the review itself:

Graphics 7/10
Could be better could be worse, environments and enemies tend to look bland. However all the psi powers and gore look great. The psi powers are usually represented by brightly colored clouds coming out of the arms of you and the bosses. Blue for Telekenisis, red for Pyrokenesis and so forth. You can tell the guys who made this game were a lot more interested in the effects than they were in the environments. To tell you the truth I'd much rather see a head explode in beautiful detail than marvel at a patch or dirt or a wall anyway. The cutscenes all look really nice as well, not amazing but better than I expected. A word of warning though, if you are squeamish or can't stand the sight of blood stay away from this game, it is very violent and graphic. I'm talking Mortal Kombat levels of violence and gore here. This is a game that encourages you to throw enemies into furnaces and fans, light people on fire and then throw them at their comrades ect. When someone gets blown up there will be entrails scattered about. You have been warned. Personally I like the violence but maybe I'm weird. The Xbox version might have slightly better graphics, I don't know. They didn't have the Xbox version at Hollywood Video and no way am I doing business with Blockbuster after they tried to steal from me. Also I don't know which system they developed it on, whichever one they did will have the better graphics. I suspect Xbox though based on the controls, more on that later.

Audio 9/10
I love the sounds of smashing bones and exploding gas canisters, the sound might not be the best ever but it's good enough for me. There isn't much music although the game has a theme done by some generic rock band called Cold. Never heard of them? Neither had I. It has a catchy tune and it fits the mood of the game pretty well, the lyrics aren't that great though. Luckily you'll only hear the lyrics during the credits, otherwise all you get is the good part.

Gameplay 8/10
Playing this game is fun, that's really what matters in the end is whether it's fun or not. You just have so many different abilities and the havok physics engine makes each kill a new experience. I love the havok physics engine, I've loved it ever since I was introduced to it in Max Payne 2. Without a killer physics engine this game wouldn't be nearly as good, plus since your main abilty is telekinesis you get to play with it much more than you would otherwise. It fact the designers must have realized this because they included a “training” area where you are simply put in a big room full of different props and infinite psi, there you can play with the physics to your hearts content. Some of the most fun I had was just throwing things around in that room just to see what would happen. I kind of got on a tangent there but if you do play this game you'll understand what I'm talking about. Anyway what the game mostly consists of is moving through areas to complete objectives such as planting some bombs or finding an access code. The objectives themselves aren't that hard and mainly serve to create a reason for you to move through an area while getting up to a bit of the ultra-violence, also this steers the game away from being too linear. You're given maps but frankly they aren't very good, sure the layout on them is accurate but they have a tendency to be a little vague and confusing. For instance it will only tell you what room you are in rather than representing you with an arrow, as is the custom nowadays. The levels also get split up between several smaller maps that don't do a very good job of telling you exactly how two areas connect. This caused me to get lost a few times but it wasn't usually that bad, it just had me spending more time than I would have liked trying to figure out my map. So anyway as you are moving around you will be confronted by various enemies known as “meat puppets” these are kind of like a cross between the borg and genome soldiers. In any case they are mindless slaves controlled by your enemies. They come in five types, a fairly normal looking one that doesn't fight much better than a normal soldier called a “meat puppet 1”, a stronger one that fights better and has some armor called the “meat puppet 2”, one that's so covered in armor an cybernetic enhancements it looks more like a robot than a human being known as the dreaded “meat puppet 3”, and then there are a scientist type and a construction type as well who are weak and almost totally helpless, needless to say these aren't common and mainly show up for special parts. In the beginning of the game the first type is the most prevalent, toward the middle of the game there are only the second and third types and by the end of the game there is only the third type. Also near the end of the game a new, creepy and very annoying enemy will appear that is kind of like a giant deadly invisible floating flea from another dimension. Mostly you can just sneak past those though since they're really stupid and blind to boot. To fight the enemies you have a gamut of psi powers as well as some guns, the guns aren't anything special and you'd do best to rely primarily on the psi powers. The psi powers consume psi energy, which can be replenished either through strange blue boxes or by stealing it from an enemy. First of all you have telekinesis, which is the power to move junk with your mind. This is your bread and butter attack that allows you to pick stuff/people up and throw it/them into other stuff/people or off a cliff etc or just gently set it down somewhere else more to your liking. People make satisfying screams as they smash into junk and if you hit them hard enough you can hear their bones breaking and they'll sometimes leave blood splatters. This is made absolutely great by the previously mentioned havok engine so they flop around like ragdolls, it makes it all look eerily realistic. Your second power is “mind drain” which allows you to replenish your psi powers by stealing the “psi energy” from enemies. Sure you can get a good amount of psi from a corpse but what's really fun is to capture a live target in psi drain and listen to him babble like a madman before his head explodes, the trick with that though is he can't know you're there for this to work or he has to be dazed, doing that will fill up almost all your psi bar. The third power is remote viewing, which allows your conscious mind to leave your body and explore on it's own totally invisible, considering it can go through doors like a ghost this is the ultimate recon tool. The fourth power is pyro-kinesis, the power to create fire to burn things. Really what that means is you get to throw fire at people from your hands. There are some great combos you can do with this and telekinesis. The fifth power is mind control, I don't think you need an explanation of what that is. Mostly this is used to make an enemy press a button or kill his buddies. You are however totally helpless while you are controlling an enemy so make sure you park yourself somewhere safe first. The last power is kind of odd and maybe a bit disappointing, it just lets you see invisible stuff, see if two items are related to each other and read erased white boards, meh. Throughout the game you'll fight several bosses, each one of them is an expert at one kind of psi power, some of these are really great and others are kind of not. For instance fighting a guy who picks up boxcars with telekinesis and hurls them at you is simply amazing, on the other hand one of the bosses just kind of turns into a giant three headed troll which isn't nearly as cool. Overall this gameplay rocks big time, unfortunately toward the end of the game the designers thought it would be cool to fill the levels with those invisible fleas and strange hovering invisible instant death inducing mines. This makes the last two levels more tedious than fun. I wanted to give gameplay a ten but they kind of blew it at the end. The game is however very fun up to that point.

Story 4/10
I feel kind of gypped by this story, at first it seems the story will be deep, complicated and interesting despite relying heavily on the videogame clichés of amnesia and mysterious women. It opens up with the protagonist Nick Scryer in some dark room getting his memory erased while two guys have a cryptic conversation. The bad guys then attack an oil refinery in the Middle East where Scryer has been planted as a soldier, they then take the soldiers who were defending it prisoner and transport them to their secret base where they intend to process them into meat puppets. Scryer is thrown unceremoniously into a holding cell to await his doom but is released by a mysterious woman who claims to know him and insists he is on an undercover mission to fight the bad guys or something. Unfortunately it doesn't end up going much of anywhere and falls into some silly thing about alien artifacts or something. This is deeply annoying considering how much potential the plot had, it could have gone anywhere really but it stayed to the beaten path. At least the personalities of the villains are interesting though, a more impressive assortment of freaks is hard to find outside Metal Gear Solid, their boss however is just some old dude known as “The General” who looks like he belongs in the evil alternate dimension on Star Trek.

Controls 8/10
Almost perfect although the telekinesis button is pressure sensitive to control altitude, frankly the L1 button was never designed for this. The Gamecube a Xbox controllers would probably be better since their shoulder buttons are built for this kind of thing. Otherwise everything is responsive and easy to use with a bit of practice.

Replay value 6/10
There are lots of new skins and minigames to unlock, it'll probably take you some time to unlock them all. Unfortunately the game is very short, a death match mode could have added a lot I think.

Overall 8/10
Even though this game has its faults I like it a lot.

Rent or buy?
I'd suggest you rent it first, if you feel like it's a game you want to own then buy it afterwards. I'll probably buy it when the price goes down.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/29/04