Epidemic

"The fact alone that this game is called Epidemic should be enough of a warning to stay away."

Score:
Gameplay: 1
Graphics: 5
Sound: 2
Value: 1
Tilt: 1

Overall: 1.7

The Good: Nothing.

The Bad: Everything.

Epidemic is the recipe for a bad game. When you think about a Japanese developed first person shooter, created before the invention of analog sticks, what would you think? Most likely bad thoughts, and if you did, then you are right. Epidemic has the foundation of what seems to be a decent storyline but the developers did too many things wrong. The absolute first thing you will notice is that the cover has a cool looking robot on it. This game must be awesome right? WRONG! I strongly advise people not to buy a game just because it has a cool looking robot on the front. After you actually put the game into your PlayStation the abomination that is terrible English voice acting will creep into your ears; bleeding is a possibility. Not to mention that the dubbing is horrible, and the words don't even match the movement of the characters mouths in the opening CG animation movie. However that could possibly be due to the terrible animation job that went into making these movies. Instead of actually trying to make their mouths match the dialogue it simply has their mouths flapping up and down uncontrollably. It's funny too because a character's mouth will start moving several seconds before they even say anything, and keep moving after they are finished talking. It just looks ridiculous.

The in-game graphics look pretty good, however this is ruined by poor level design and a crappy draw distance (draw distance is the distance where objects and scenery in the distance will appear in your view). The first level has a bunch of security cameras positioned all over the place on the second level as well as mounted laser turrets. The problem is a combination between crappy controls and not even being able to see what you are supposed to be shooting at. You will first notice this by walking down a hallway while the end of the hallway is black, so then all of a sudden these laser beams start slamming into you and you can't actually see where they are coming from. So you have to keep going forward until the laser turret actually appears onto your screen, all while being continuously shot. Then you have to hold down the L1 and R1, and L2 and R2 buttons together to look up and down. Then you have to press the left and right directions on the d-pad to try and position your aim on the turret. Finally, you have to wait for your missile to actually lock onto the turret before you can destroy it. This isn't the only situation where problems like this arise. With security cameras it's the same thing but you won't actually know there is even a security camera there until you've already walked right in front of it and it goes off. Then you have a bunch of little security robots swarming you while you attempt to maneuver into the proper position to destroy the camera. And you can't even run away because security robots will swarm all over the entire level until you destroy the camera that triggered the alarm.

If you manage to get past these parts without being blown to pieces you still have to monotonous chore of keycard hunting and weird puzzle solving. You will run around the level and walk into a room with a whole bunch of weird designs with absolutely no idea what you are supposed to do with them. So you basically have to solve a weird puzzle, get a keycard, open a door and then solve another weird puzzle to get another keycard to open another door. The worst part of it all is when you spent an hour on a level and get utterly destroyed by the end-level boss. If you die you have to do everything all over again, yes, everything.

To make matters even worse the level design is boring, confusing and repetitive. Each level uses the same textures over and over again and its hard to remember where you are going and where you are thanks to the poor draw distance, and the useless map on the HUD, that rotates all over the place every time you move which causes much confusion. The sound is even worse; you've got cheesy as hell voice acting for every single character in the game, and a really lame sounding "woman's robot voice" that does the sound of your mech's computer system. It sounds really bad and low quality. There's also a bunch of terrible sound effects too, the explosions sound lame, and the gun shots sound even worse. The only decent sounding weapon is the rechargeable laser, in spite of this fact however, it's the most useless weapon. The music sounds decent during the CG cut scenes but during the actually levels its repetitive and loops every couple seconds, with constant beeping sounds which are just a concoction to drive you up the wall.

The replay value in Epidemic is pretty bad, especially since you can only save in between levels. So you can spend an hour on a level just to die, and then you have to do every thing all over again. This will happen several times on the first level, and most people would just throw the game out the window because it's not worth playing the same level over and over again to just keep dying because of frustrating controls and level design. Epidemic is a game that asks you to be patient, but when dealing with so many frustrating elements, it's not a possible feat.

Simply put, Epidemic really isn't a game worth playing. You've probably never heard of it before, and you're better off continuing your life pretending you don't know that this game exists. There are hundreds of better first person shooters out there, and there are a ton of better shooters that have come out before and during the same time as Epidemic. You can't judge Epidemic against first person shooters of today, because that would just be unfair, but when you compare it to alternatives around the same time period, Epidemic just doesn't match up to the rest. With the possibility of an in-game glitch corrupting your PlayStation memory card, (known problem with the game) and the slew of frustrating controls and gameplay elements, Epidemic is simply a showcase of how not to make a first person shooter and is not recommended in any way, shape, or form.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 01/26/07