Archived Review

Abomination

Abomination: The Nemesis Project is quite possibly the first game I have ever played where the name of the game accurately describes the game itself. This game is a mess. Abomination attempts to take the combat portion of X-COM, change it into real time, and make it fun. The game fails, utterly and miserably.

Now, reading the box, it claims that X-COM fans will flock to this game. As I throw the box violently against the wall, I must reflect on this statement. I am an X-COM fan. I pity any other X-COM fans who fall for the writing on the box, much as I did. This game has very little in common with X-COM - basically the only thing they have in common is that there is a squad action combat system. Well, there’s also a “city” view for those two minutes spent in-between missions, which is extremely ugly - but we’ll get to that later. For now, just rest assured that there is very little to recommend this game to X-COM fans. Or anyone else, for that matter.

The first thing that struck me about the game upon loading it was about how ugly it was. I mean, I’ve seen ugly graphics before. Back in 1995. Abomination looks like it comes from about that timeframe. Well, maybe 96 or 97. The pre-rendered backgrounds are cartoonish and well…ugly! There’s just no other way I can describe it. The houses look no better than the urban battles in the original X-COM, and that’s saying something, considering that X-COM was behind the graphics curve back then! About the only thing going for Abomination over X-COM in the graphics department is that Abomination uses 16-bit color, as opposed to 8-bit. Otherwise, there isn’t much in the way of graphical improvement. The characters are funky little sprites who walk and run funny. Even the explosions, which just about any game can do well these days, look horrible!

One of the more interesting graphical problems comes from the choice of colors the designers decided to use. Let it be a note to all of you who are thinking about designing a game - black text on a dark red background is not cool. Extremely heavy overuse of black and red is not cool. Using red for simply everything is not cool. It’s a pain to read, and it just looks plain ugly. The worst part of the graphics is not that they use black text on dark red backgrounds, it’s that EVERYTHING is black and dark red for the interfaces!

Even the sound effects are, for lack of other words, ugly. The gun fire sounds just like little “pop-pop-pop” at different speeds, depending on how fast the gun you’re using fires. There is just enough variation in the type of sound a gun makes so that you can tell the difference between a shotgun and an automatic rifle, but the sound is still weak. Explosions are even weaker.

The voice effects are cornier than a cornfield in the middle of Iowa. I have no idea whose voices were used for the effects, and I really don’t want to know. If the designers were going for scary voices for the enemy, they failed pretty laughably. Cries of “Die unbeliever!”, “Mutant scum!”, and “The Brood!” in the funniest voices you can imagine echo throughout the battlegrounds. About the only good sound effects are the random cries of pain in the background, which add a bit of atmosphere to the game.

Playing the game is at first a lesson in frustration, then a lesson in stupidity. The “city” interface screen is fairly confusing and amazingly non-interactive. Clicking on your base buildings tells you nothing except what they are, with no options to do anything. It took me quite a while to figure out how to order ammo and weapons to add to my stockpile, which wasn’t mentioned very clearly in the manual. I actually thoroughly read game manuals before I play a game. This manual was no help at all. Back to the city interface - there basically is none. You can outfit your troops with weapons and items, using an Abomination standard ugly-red-and-black interface. The aforementioned interface is fairly non-intuitive, a situation which the manual does nothing to rectify.

Heading into combat is laughable. First of all, you can only take a team of four at most. With the number of nasty critters waiting for you later on, I’d want to bring all sixteen troops. Yes that’s right, you can only have sixteen troops max, and only take four of them at a time on a mission. By the fifth or sixth mission, all of them will be hurt, since there is basically no way to avoid getting shot up in this game. It’s really kind of pathetic. So, you bring your troops into combat, and here’s where you find out something that will stick with you for the rest of the game: your troops are legally brain-dead. They have no intelligence whatsoever. They will blindly rush into the midst of a group of enemies with AK-47 rifles, trying to kill them all with a pistol. And better yet, if you have them selected, they will do absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. An enemy can come up to them and poke them in the eye, and they won’t react at all.

What does this mean to you, the poor player? It means you have to baby-sit all four of your buff men and women. These supposedly genetically enhanced commandos are dumber than rocks. Strike one.

Strike two comes with the viewing screen. You’re only allowed to see in a certain radius around your troops, so the screen scrolling is limited in a very annoying way. Points for the attempted realism factor, but mega points off for the huge annoyance factor. Another nasty point of the viewing screen - you can’t walk behind anything. Well, you can, but you can’t specifically move your troops behind a building. This can be quite a pain, as you know a shorter path is behind this building, but since you can’t scroll past it, you can’t run behind it and go around.

Strike three is the weapon system. I just have to laugh about this. The way the game looks scaled, it appears that an AK-47 has a maximum range of about 50 feet. A sniper rifle has a range of about 60, and a shotgun or pistol, about 40. This means that you can’t set up any sort of ambush with a sniper, or jump on some guy at point blank with a shotgun, or do any type of tactical ambush. You’re reduced to clicking on the guy you want to kill, watching your troops line up facing the enemy lineup, and moving from target to target. And when it’s about twelve or twenty to four, it gets pretty ugly. And then…then there is the amusement that is a grenade. Your troops can throw a grenade farther than they can shoot a sniper rifle. Need I say more?

This game takes a lot of ideas from X-COM, and just mutates them into something awful. X-COM Apocalypse did the real-time urban combat thing, and did it several times better. I may even have to reload that now to get the taste of this game out of my mouth.

Abomination has a multi-player element. That’s about all that can be said for that, because I haven’t found anyone else who has this game. The MPlayer lobby was quite empty last time I checked. I am very relieved by this, because it means people haven’t gotten this awful game.

One redeeming part of this game is that it’s stable. I never had any of the crashing problems which are so endemic to Windows applications. Another redeeming quality is a working uninstall program. A bad technical point is that the missions take a bit of time to load. Granted, this is probably because the game has “millions” of different missions to pick and choose from, but still, load times are annoying.

In the end, Abomination is an abomination. The game design is awful, worse than any other game I have ever played. The graphics are ugly, the sound is ugly, and it’s just so flawed that it’s disgusting. However, it is sort of fun, in a sick, twisted, and moderately masochistic way. Avoid this game. I must go cleanse this stain from my hard drive now.