I recently picked this up from EBGames in their second hand bit. I'd seen articles about it before it came out, but what with one thing and another, I'd been too busy to pay it some serious attention, but I'd been intrigued by the premise. S.O.S.: Final Escape (PS2)
If Action has a name, that name is Keith!
I recently picked this up from EBGames in their second hand bit. I'd seen articles about it before it came out, but what with one thing and another, I'd been too busy to pay it some serious attention, but I'd been intrigued by the premise.
The premise was that you're an everyman reporter (called Keith - they obviously wanted to steer clear of action-hero name clichés as much as possible) on his way to a ficticious coastal (read: island) city when a massive and devastating earthquake strikes. In a few moments the pristine city is turned from idylic paradise to twisted nightmare. Buildings collapse, streets flood, there was a promise of a fragile and constantly reconfiguring city in which your sole goal was to escape and survive.
That was the premise though.
The actual game is sadly a different story. From the very first load screen, you can tell something has gone horribly wrong. The title for the game takes up a huge part of the otherwise plain white screen, and the traditional "New Game, Load Game, Options" choices are teeny tiny text links on the very left edge of the screen. Given my PS2 is hooked up to fairly small portable telly, I spent a few seconds during my first load waiting for the menu to appear, only to realise that it already had!
Starting a new game, the sense of trepidation gets worse. Not because of the terrifying prospect of being in the epicentre of a massive earthquake, but because of the horrible voice acting and cut scenes. This game looks awful. The buildings and characters are blocky, ugly, blandly textured and the animation and overall aesthetic is akin to Virtua Cop circa 1997. Coming from recent releases like the beautiful Half-Life 2, seeing square faced protagonists with no lip-sync'ing or facial animation at all is a jar. Hell, the reporter you meet is able to talk with his mouth closed around a never-shortening cigarette. And only certain scenes have voice acting. Sometimes half-way through they just stop, to leave the subtitles to tell the story. Due to the face-clawingly awful and wooden voices though, this is kind of a blessing.
Graphical complexity alone though is not the key ingredient to a wonderful game. Anyone who played Unreal 2 could tell you that. Here, though, they're just another failure in a game that reeks of them. A city being torn apart, done with a combination of realtime-physics and destructible scenery (think a combination of the Havok (Half-Life 2) and Geomod (Red Faction) engines) would be a thrilling and fantastic place. For a game obviously. Cars swerving off roads, buildings cracking and crumbling. The sense of immersion would be palpable. Instead you're treated to a walk through bland game levels, with pre-scripted events occuring as you cross certain areas. And that's assuming you can see them. The camera is award-winning in my book as the worst I've seen in as long as I can remember.
Some things people have got right, and now shouldn't be mucked about with. Camera and controls are two of those things. Go play GTA. Say Vice City or San Andreas. The left analogue stick for motion and right for camera alignment. It's simple, flexible, and most of all, it works. In SOS:FE the camera mostly follows the traditional third-person viewpoint that's been popular since a certain Ms. Croft appeared on the screen. But occasionally, it'll switch to an on-rails camera that will jump ahead of you, stopping you from seeing where you're going, and also obscuring the huge chunk of building that's about to land on you and kill you. Or it'll only let you look one direction down a corridor, then expect you to jump blindly towards camera to climb up ledges. A task further complicated by the complete lack of a jump key! Kevin will decide to jump if you happen to be pressing the run button while heading towards an edge. And any edge will do. He'll do a leg-split-Footloose-Kenny-Loggins leap if you happen to run off the edge of the pavement. That crazy kid. The same goes for climbing. He'll climb up a chest-high crate if the developers wanted you to go that way, but will stand blithely by at the edge of a level and refuse to lift his legs for an 8" high wall.
This lack of 'realism' wouldn't be so irritating if the developers hadn't tried to play it as a key feature in other parts of the game. As well as the tradional health bar (restorable by health packs and gauzes found scattered amongst the levels, never in a logical place) there's a "thirst" gauge, which Kevin must replenish or die of dehydration. Good idea. A nice "real-world" factor to integrate into play. But even on easy it drops at a ludicrous rate. Apparently Kevin is an "everyman" with a chronic kidney complaint and incontinence. Nothing else explains his inability to run from one end of a street to the other without drying out like a puddle in the sun. The same goes for wearable items. Protective gloves suddenly disappear after a few minutes playing due to "disrepair", apparently having being manufactured from tissue paper.
The one thing that shines through this game is its original development location. Japan. Aside from that every one of the handful of characters looks like a Tekken character going to their day job, the sexist "little girl lost" persona of fellow survivor Karen whose role in the game is little more than to look doe-eyed and helpless whilst you find a path through the levels, is grating in a modern world of Buffy, Ripley and sydney Bristow. She even stands shivering in the rain in one section, allowing you to give her an umbrella to shield herself if you feel like. This, despite standing 15 feet from an alcove which would allow her to remain dry using her own free will!
This game is a terrible waste of a great idea. With thronged streets of NPC's fleeing for their doomed lives, vehicles crashing and burning, buildings collapsing... a very human story of survival against the odds could have been told. Instead shoddy design, empty levels, improbable physics and a pointless storyline make this a a very hard title to like.
Score 3/10
© Barny Russell 2004