7 out of 7 people found this review helpful.
Not original but great fun
Date of Review: Jan 1, 2001
I know a lot of people won't agree with me but I thought this game was great, I love it! But if you're a Kiss fan I wouldn't buy the game just on that basis, I mean as far as I can see the game doesn't have a lot to do with Kiss the band - maybe I'm missing something :-) I'm not a fan (or non-fan) of Kiss so I couldn't really comment. The only link to the band I'm aware of is the Kiss music when you turn on the jukebox at various points in the game, including right at the beginning - I thought it was pretty cool and gets you in the right mood for the game!
Anyway, basically I would forget that this game has anything to do with Kiss and just judge it on its merits as a game, and on that score I think it does pretty well - *ok* it's not original, but you can hardly criticise games for that, how many games are truly original these days!?! It's a typical first-person-shooter like Quake or Half Life, so if you didn't like those games you're not gonna like this, probably! But if you loved those, as I did, then as long as you're not expecting groundbreaking originality or lots to do with Kiss, you should love this too!
The graphics I think are very good, and there are 'movie' interludes between levels which are pretty cool too, but you can press space to skip them if you can't wait to get back into the action! As has been said elsewhere, the AI of the enemies isn't too hot - none of them are exactly Einstein, they just come towards you even if they're unarmed & you're holding a huge weapon !!
The sound is also pretty good, including very atmospheric background music, and decent effects and speech.
But the best thing about this game, apart from the great graphics and sound, is simply: it's FUN!!! The controls are very friendly and will be familiar to anyone who's played Half Life - and you can map the keys to be like Half Life if you like, which I did - ie. CTRL for duck, space for jump. Also I never had the problem which has been mentioned in another review, of having trouble manoeuvring precisely, to walk along tight spaces etc. - just like Half Life you can 'quicksave' which is always highly recommended just before tackling any tricky obstacles or situations anyway!
In summary, if you are a fps fan I recommend this, I had hours of fun with it, it's got loads of levels and is a lot of fun.