Psychotoxic
Written by Jared Rea on 6/30/2005 for
PC
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Psychotoxic
Within my first fifteen minutes of play time with Psychotoxic, I was already attempting to fathom an explanation for this titles existence. Perhaps the developer, Nuclearvision, produced this game as a joke aimed at the sudden popularity of other titles on the market focusing on psychic gameplay. Surely, this was not a serious effort. Right?
Regardless, within those first fifteen minutes I managed to become stuck in a small box I had no right to enter, jump out of the world twice, only to follow those magical acts with an encore composed of the game crashing to my desktop while attempting to load a previous save. One level down, twenty-nine more to go. Welcome to Psychotoxic.
As Angie Prophet, you posess superhuman powers that fail to do anything of remote interest, much like your penchant for horrid one-liners and pseudo-goth overtones. For one reason or another, the world is in the middle of a crisis due to wars raging on every continent. What does this have to do with the overall plot? Absolutely nothing. Angie is summoned by the FBI to, single handedly mind you, battle the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, having been summoned by a satanist man known as Aaron Cowley to prevent them from bombing New York city to kingdom come. What is your motivation do do this? Angst and a lot of it.
The story is fed to you largely by in-game cinemas which feature some of the most cringe worthy scipting and voice acting seen since the original Resident Evil. The only problem here is that you're not laughing with it, and it's too pathetic to laugh at it. Instead, you're forced to watch 70's Kung-Fu style lip syncing, and character models awkwardly puppet themselves around which make you wonder if the people at Nuclearvision even realize how the human body performs. By the time you get into the game, you may have already slipped into a coma that the game will ultimately fail to wake you from.
Pyschotoxic's gameplay revolves around two types of levels. Those that take place in the modern world where people are attempting to shoot at you for no reason, and those that take place in the dream world, via Angie's powers that allow her to tap into the minds of unsuspecting victims for information and other various goals. While these dream levels are quite novel and do help to break up the completely uninteresting real world levels, they merely serve as the vehicle for a whole slew of jumping puzzles and other random, First-Person Shooter cliches that I figured died somewhere in the year 1998. Regardless, all of these levels are played exactly the same. Travel from Point A to Point B and kill anything that gets in your way. No thinking here, folks.
The superhuman abilities of Angie also never quite come into full fruition. The game never allows you to believe that she actually has these powers either, considering that they come in the form of power-ups granting you the abilities of a defense shield, healing, slow motion and invisibility. In other psychic games such as Psi-Ops or Second Sight, the psychic aspect of the gameplay stands at the forefront of the design. In Psychotoxic, picking up your weapon and going "Bang bang bang " and ignoring the whole psychic element seems to work better.
Helping you along these missions is your own personal Cortana who is nothing more than a pair of lips in a window and reminds me a bit too much of 80's icon, Max Headroom. It's appropriate in this situation that his name is Max to further my confusion. While not quite helpful as annoying and only proving to further shatter what semblance of flow remains in this game, Max pops in from time to time to feed you brainless information about what to do next. A blur overlay is placed over the screen and his window pops up to commence the jibber-jabber.
This action sometimes manages to throw you right back to your desktop in a crash. Maybe he really is helpful after all.
While Psychotoxic's gameplay straddles the conventions set forth by the legion of FPS games before it, there are several quirks in what you are allowed to do that simply do not make any sense. The largest such is the ability to lean to the left and the right so that you could possibly look around corners without running blind. This is all well and good, but what is the point of leaning if you're not allowed to shoot while doing so? In the end, I figured it was to have another means of alerting the enemies to your position faster with their haphazard AI.
Haphazard is the only fitting word for the enemy AI, as they tend to show a spark of alertness every so often, but for the most part they play the role of dopes. Sometimes you'll walk through a door and that guy across the room will suddenly snap around and begin running to your position. Sometimes, you'll be able to walk right up to his face and pull the trigger. My favorite are the enemies who do nothing but stand behind doors (Which feature the AIM open-door sound for both opening and closing) and do nothing but repeat a canned phrase over and over until you decide to go in there and put him out of his misery. In combat, enemies do have a trick or two by means of rolls, going prone and other such random acts of defense. Ultimately, they're animated so awkwardly and useless that it's never a challenge.
On top of all these massive faults, Psychotoxic's physics engine is stuck in the stone age of development. I use the word "physics" liberally, as what is displayed in game can barely be called physics. Every single object in Psychotoxic weighs exactly the same. Running down a hallway and walking into a glass bottle on the ground stops you completely in your tracks as if you had run into a chair. Push over a piece of paper and it falls with the same weight as the coffee mug as the TV as the books. Pathetic is truly the only word to describe the sad, sad antics.
Graphically, this title fails to impress and is seemingly on par with other budget ware trash on the market. Some characters are modeled so poorly that they look more like oranges sitting upon toothpicks, forcing you to ponder if the developers even knew how to accurately render a human body. There are few graphical effects to speak of and what is there is very run of the mill. Textures repeat, environmental effects look cheesy, models clip through everything -- you get the picture. It's a wreck.
After experiencing Psychotoxic, I came to the conclusion that maybe, Daikatana wasn't that bad. It's ridiculously long, completely uninspired and quite simply, the biggest waste of my gaming time in the past decade. Even if struck deaf, blind and dumb, anyone can realize that Psychotoxic is without a doubt, one of the worst PC titles of all time.
Regardless, within those first fifteen minutes I managed to become stuck in a small box I had no right to enter, jump out of the world twice, only to follow those magical acts with an encore composed of the game crashing to my desktop while attempting to load a previous save. One level down, twenty-nine more to go. Welcome to Psychotoxic.
As Angie Prophet, you posess superhuman powers that fail to do anything of remote interest, much like your penchant for horrid one-liners and pseudo-goth overtones. For one reason or another, the world is in the middle of a crisis due to wars raging on every continent. What does this have to do with the overall plot? Absolutely nothing. Angie is summoned by the FBI to, single handedly mind you, battle the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, having been summoned by a satanist man known as Aaron Cowley to prevent them from bombing New York city to kingdom come. What is your motivation do do this? Angst and a lot of it.
The story is fed to you largely by in-game cinemas which feature some of the most cringe worthy scipting and voice acting seen since the original Resident Evil. The only problem here is that you're not laughing with it, and it's too pathetic to laugh at it. Instead, you're forced to watch 70's Kung-Fu style lip syncing, and character models awkwardly puppet themselves around which make you wonder if the people at Nuclearvision even realize how the human body performs. By the time you get into the game, you may have already slipped into a coma that the game will ultimately fail to wake you from.
Pyschotoxic's gameplay revolves around two types of levels. Those that take place in the modern world where people are attempting to shoot at you for no reason, and those that take place in the dream world, via Angie's powers that allow her to tap into the minds of unsuspecting victims for information and other various goals. While these dream levels are quite novel and do help to break up the completely uninteresting real world levels, they merely serve as the vehicle for a whole slew of jumping puzzles and other random, First-Person Shooter cliches that I figured died somewhere in the year 1998. Regardless, all of these levels are played exactly the same. Travel from Point A to Point B and kill anything that gets in your way. No thinking here, folks.
The superhuman abilities of Angie also never quite come into full fruition. The game never allows you to believe that she actually has these powers either, considering that they come in the form of power-ups granting you the abilities of a defense shield, healing, slow motion and invisibility. In other psychic games such as Psi-Ops or Second Sight, the psychic aspect of the gameplay stands at the forefront of the design. In Psychotoxic, picking up your weapon and going "Bang bang bang " and ignoring the whole psychic element seems to work better.
Helping you along these missions is your own personal Cortana who is nothing more than a pair of lips in a window and reminds me a bit too much of 80's icon, Max Headroom. It's appropriate in this situation that his name is Max to further my confusion. While not quite helpful as annoying and only proving to further shatter what semblance of flow remains in this game, Max pops in from time to time to feed you brainless information about what to do next. A blur overlay is placed over the screen and his window pops up to commence the jibber-jabber.
This action sometimes manages to throw you right back to your desktop in a crash. Maybe he really is helpful after all.
While Psychotoxic's gameplay straddles the conventions set forth by the legion of FPS games before it, there are several quirks in what you are allowed to do that simply do not make any sense. The largest such is the ability to lean to the left and the right so that you could possibly look around corners without running blind. This is all well and good, but what is the point of leaning if you're not allowed to shoot while doing so? In the end, I figured it was to have another means of alerting the enemies to your position faster with their haphazard AI.
Haphazard is the only fitting word for the enemy AI, as they tend to show a spark of alertness every so often, but for the most part they play the role of dopes. Sometimes you'll walk through a door and that guy across the room will suddenly snap around and begin running to your position. Sometimes, you'll be able to walk right up to his face and pull the trigger. My favorite are the enemies who do nothing but stand behind doors (Which feature the AIM open-door sound for both opening and closing) and do nothing but repeat a canned phrase over and over until you decide to go in there and put him out of his misery. In combat, enemies do have a trick or two by means of rolls, going prone and other such random acts of defense. Ultimately, they're animated so awkwardly and useless that it's never a challenge.
On top of all these massive faults, Psychotoxic's physics engine is stuck in the stone age of development. I use the word "physics" liberally, as what is displayed in game can barely be called physics. Every single object in Psychotoxic weighs exactly the same. Running down a hallway and walking into a glass bottle on the ground stops you completely in your tracks as if you had run into a chair. Push over a piece of paper and it falls with the same weight as the coffee mug as the TV as the books. Pathetic is truly the only word to describe the sad, sad antics.
Graphically, this title fails to impress and is seemingly on par with other budget ware trash on the market. Some characters are modeled so poorly that they look more like oranges sitting upon toothpicks, forcing you to ponder if the developers even knew how to accurately render a human body. There are few graphical effects to speak of and what is there is very run of the mill. Textures repeat, environmental effects look cheesy, models clip through everything -- you get the picture. It's a wreck.
After experiencing Psychotoxic, I came to the conclusion that maybe, Daikatana wasn't that bad. It's ridiculously long, completely uninspired and quite simply, the biggest waste of my gaming time in the past decade. Even if struck deaf, blind and dumb, anyone can realize that Psychotoxic is without a doubt, one of the worst PC titles of all time.
1.0 is the lowest GamingNexus goes. I'm giving it .5 just for the fact that it installed and actually functioned. Like. . wow. Usually I keep as open as a mind as possible but this was beyond. . beyond. . . beyond bad.
Rating: 1.5 Horrible
* The product in this article was sent to us by the developer/company.
