Kileak: The DNA Imperative

"Okay, I'm really confused right now...you're saying that this is your idea of an FPS!?"

Well well...here we have one of the games on the PSX that goes in the Almost Complete Crap category. The sad thing is, this game could have been much better, but instead has only one real redeeming quality...and even that redeeming quality has flaws. I don't like ripping games a new one unless they truly deserve it, and this one does.

Story: 1
Extremely stupid...strange experiments are going on inside a space lab, stuff goes haywire, robots in lab kill all the humans inside, you have to stop them before they get loose. Oh, and you have a really stupid sidekick named Carlos who seems to be able to give you tips on what to look out for in the current level you're on but NEVER COMES TO HELP YOU AT ALL EVEN THOUGH HE IS IN THE SPACE LAB AS WELL.

Gameplay: 3
I am going to get the best thing about this game out of the way. You are equipped with a pretty damn cool space suit. It's so huge you'll almost feel like you're in a mech. You must carefully watch how many bullets you have or you won't have any chance of survival. This little bit of realism adds to the fun of the gameplay. Not only do you have to worry about that, you have to watch your life support power. If it gets too low, the first thing to go is your speed, making it hard to find/return to a power generator and recharge. Soon you'll slow down to a crawl...then you suffocate. If you progress through the game long enough, you will be able to find a weapon that is powered by your internal life support battery. This weapon is good to use if you run out of bullets, but if you use it too much you'll get low on batteries. If you shoot it too much, your suit will automatically stop you from shooting it further to conserve energy. These neat elements that your space suit possess capture how terrifying it would be to be alone on a planet without any oxygen and how you have to keep your wits about you at all times to survive. Well, since the way I'm talking makes this game sound cool, you are probably wondering why I give it a 2. I'll tell you...

Miles and miles of boring space lab levels! Way too powerful robot enemies that look so stupid an 8 year old probably designed them! It is extremely hard to avoid enemy fire. You WILL get hit by at least one bullet per enemy! This is due to the fact that you can't sneak up on enemies, the enemies are deadly accurate and you cannot strafe! Heck, even if you could strafe the lab corridors aren't that wide anyway. Rooms where you have space to move around are few and far between. There also aren't that many weapons, either. Your main weapon will almost always be your first gun unless you run out of bullets in which case you'll use the gun that drains your life support. Oh, did I mention that your health packs look like medkits, even though you're repairing a mech suit and not bandaging up a wound?

Graphics: 2
Blargh. I wouldn't be surprised if they took the Wolfenstein 3D engine and threw it in, cuz that's how this game looks. Robots have very few polygons and look like satanic lego blocks with guns strapped to them. Even though the robots were horribly designed, the least they could have done was give them decent textures, but noooo. The same goes for the endless bland lab corridors. One of the reasons it's so easy for your enemies to hit you is because you have a very low rendering depth on screen and right when you see a retarded looking robot you get hit by a bullet a fraction of a second later. This isn't due to a limitation in the PSX's power, either. The PSX can render much deeper than that without losing frames. The items you pick up all look fine except for the stupid ''medkit'' repair modules.

Sound: 2
The sound effects of gunfire and item acquisition are fine, but some of the voices are just plain crap. One of the voices you will learn to hate (if you actually play this game) will be the computer voice inside your suit, especially if your life support is in danger. ''Battery, low...battery, low...battery, low...'' It does NOT stop until you either recharge or die. This isn't the worst voice by far, however. Wait until you hear your buddy Carlos speak to you. They hired some friggin dork who does the fakest, most DOWNRIGHT REVOLTING spanish accent you will ever hear! ''Hola, thees ees Carlos, watch out for thee enemees on thees flowr, theyee are veecious!'' I wouldn't be surprised if some people are even offended by it.

Oops...I almost forgot to talk about the music! Let me put it this way...the first level music has BONGO DRUMS in it. The songs in the levels thereafter aren't that much different. Real fitting music for a space lab, eh?

Control: 1
With all the buttons on the PSX controller, the control could have been great. The top buttons could have been used to move forward, backward and strafe, the joypad could be used for mouselook and the shift buttons for firing and changing weapons. Instead, you have stupid, useless menus taking up some of the buttons. Yeah, this game isn't a recent PSX game, but it's not a 1st generation one, either. I guess that shows how much time the developers put into the game.

Replay Value: 1
Yeah right. If you actually beat this game, you'll most likely feel like throwing it through Funco Land's window and running away.

Bottom Line?
There are much better PSX FPSes. Play those games, not this one. The one good thing about this game doesn't save it by a longshot. This is more of a torture device than a game due to it's incredibly retarded robot enemies, horrible voice acting, nauseating texture quality and way too simple 3D engine, which is why I give it a 2.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 08/09/01, Updated 08/10/01