A/X-101

"A dull, bland, and broken space shooter."

The Sega CD had quite a few games that used a lot of full motion video; of course, most of them weren't very good. AX-101 perfectly illustrates this point. When I dug this game up out of my basement, I caught a glimpse of the back of the box, which described it as a ''thrilling three-dimensional adventure''. Once I popped it into my Sega CD, it proved to be a major disappointment.

When I heard ''3D space shooter'', I thought of Star Fox. But this game is nothing like it. This game has barely any gameplay. Most games are often repetitive, but this one takes the cake. It has barely any depth at all. Why, you ask? Well, for starters, the game just sticks a random video clip on the screen and then sticks the same static enemies on top of it over and over again, and by ''on top of it'' I mean literally; the enemies and environments are pre-rendered, so you don't interact with the environment AT ALL, and neither do the enemies. The game just basically plops down the video of the background and then plops the enemy graphics on top of it, and it looks bizarre because even when the enemies are a large distance away, they will appear on top of the scenery. It contributes to the fact that this game is barely varied at all, everything is static. All you do is move around a cursor and fire lasers, you can't even steer your ship. But it's not like the backgrounds actually do anything, all they seem to be is a waste of space on the disc. You could replace the video clips with just a blank black square and the gameplay would be exactly the same. They have absolutely no affect on what happens in the game. Not only that, the enemies aren't varied in the least. Since they are pre-rendered flying in from different sides of the screen, they really only have 4 or 5 different ways of appearing. The game just makes you fight wave after wave of enemies flying in from exactly the same spots in a straight line and then disappearing completely. Half of them don't even fire at you, and when they do, for some reason they shoot large slow-moving yellow rocks at you, which you are basically the same as the enemies except when they get close to you you take damage. Of course they are pre-rendered as well, so enemies are restricted to firing them from the exact same spots over and over again. This gets incredibly boring after a while because there are no differences between enemies at all besides the way they look. All of them fly in the same boring paths and fire the same boring yellow rocks at you. There are occasionally bosses to fight, but they don't do anything either; they fly around and around in circles tossing yellow rocks at you. Throw together about 50 stages of doing this and you've got AX-101.

But even more pathetic is that the developers couldn't even program bland gameplay correctly. The ''collision detection'' is very poor, half the time your shots won't count when they obviously hit the enemies. This gets ridiculously frustrating after a while when you keep losing because your shots don't register. Part of the problem is due to the lack of precision in the cursor you use to aim your lasers; instead of accelerating after a second of holding on the pad or going slower or faster depending on a button press, it always moves about 8 pixels no matter how slightly you tap the pad. You can't aim for things accurately because your cursor is incapable of positioning over them, unless they're 2 feet away from you in which case they fire at you and you get hit. You'll just end up aiming for the corners of objects half the time, which never works because the collision detection is awful. By the time you're done with the game you'll be wading in broken controllers.

And not only that, the ''incredible 3D graphics'' are horribly dull. There are awful palette problems; there is barely any variance in color used and everything looks washed out. This is partly due to the lack of good color support in the Genesis hardware, but they seriously could have done better. But it gets worse. The pre-rendered objects aren't very detailed, in fact they are rather bland. Everything either lacks texture or just generally looks cheap. In a certain stage there is supposed to be a large explosion in the background (which of course has no effect on you or anything else), but the artists seemed to think it would look like an explosion if they took a large sphere and stuck a dull fiery texture on it. Does it look like an explosion? Not really, it looks like a giant sphere. The enemies are even worse, most of the time they're just random arrangements of shapes stuck together with little patches of color on them. Cheesy stuff like this is prominent throughout the game, it is rather evident that the 3D artists really didn't want to spend too much time on this game.

As for sound, it's pretty much nonexistent. During the game there is no music or anything, just a faint hum of your ship and the occasional ''boom'' or ''bang'' or ''ka-pow'', but besides those few ambient sounds there is nothing. There are little movies that play between every stage that illustrate the story (yes, this game has a story), and they've appropriately recorded voices for the characters in them. They're kind of cheesy just like everything else, and the animation is equally dull and bland looking. The story really isn't all that interesting, and it's kind of stupid too; I found myself skipping most of the movies.

In the end, AX-101 is generally just a bad game. It's not fun to play, it's just tedious and gets repetitive way too quickly. And to top it off, it has so many problems and shortcomings that it loses all hope of being even mediocre. It seems that the developers just cut corners whenever they could when making this game, and when they couldn't they did a half-assed job. The way they decided to make this game is rigid, but they most certainly could have done better. Either way the formula (action packed space-shooting + rigid FMV) isn't very good. If you're ever planning on purchasing some classic Sega CD games, stay far away from this one, it's dreadful.

Pros
Not much. You might be able to get away with playing this game for 15 minutes or so before getting frustrated and bored, so it's not completely horrible... And the storyline is pretty much mediocre.

Cons
Tedious, boring, problematic gameplay
Dull graphics
Barely any in-game audio

Overall Rating: 2/10

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 11/08/03