System Played: Nintendo DS
Year Released: 2006
Year Reviewed: 2012
Scurge: Hive is a top-down, isometric action game for the Nintedo DS (and GBA) from Orbital Media(?).
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… lone female space bounty hunter is sent in to investigate a research base gone tits up? It’s Metroid, specifically Metroid Fusion since your suit is infected early on with the titular virus and all the enemies drop regenerative snot when shot.
In addition to the obvious Metroid influences, the game also has a smell of Boktai about it, being a colourful, top-down, isometric shooter/puzzle game for the most part. Early on, you’re infected with Scurge and have to play the entire game with your contamination level constantly increasing. If infection reaches 100%, your HP begins to deplete rapidly until you eventually snuff it or make it to one of the many decontamination rooms which are placed liberally around the facility and also act as old school save stations (again, a bit like Metroid). Luckily you never seem to be too far from a decontamination room but you still need to factor this in before making a push forward as enemies and some doors will reset if you need to leave a room mid-progress to retreat and get healed up.
Despite the isometric view, you can still move and shoot in eight directions. You might think this affords enough freedom of movement but I still found lining up shots to be a bit ‘stiff’, and at times even painful (ergonomics never being a handhelds strong suit). Diagonal shots just don’t feel natural on the 4 direction D-Pad and only slightly more wieldy on the 3DS’s circle pad (but a bit easier on my work-in-progress carpal tunnel).
At first, you can only shoot and jump but you soon acquire new gun upgrades and items which allow you to access new areas, in a video game stylee.
There is a selection of gun upgrades for example, each with different attributes which match enemy types: EMP shots increase damage on mechanical enemies, Fire does more damage to biological enemies, but fire will also power-up mechanicals so you’re constantly having to switch weapons in a rock, paper, scissor fashion. This literally has you switching weapons for every enemy you see, as they tend to come in groups with opposite weaknesses (so you’ll be damaging one but powering up the other). Luckily, switching is made pretty easy with a Mass Effect style wheel which pops up when you hold R, but it still starts to grate when you’ve been doing it every other second for hours at a time.
Gun upgrades also help you progress, for example electric shots can power generators. There are also a number of locked doors which require you find a specific number of keys to open. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself on a couple of occasions towards the end wasting long periods of time backtracking through rooms looking for that one last elusive keycard needed to open the door you need to progress. Keycards don’t show up on the map, instead are indicated with a sound which bleeps out when you’re in the same room as one …so the only way to find it is to traipse back through areas you’ve already been to (probably several times) and hope you stumble upon it before too much time is wasted. Backtracking is never fun!
Speaking of the map, the bottom DS screen has this constantly on display with your main objectives highlighted. Touchscreen functionality is limited to moving the map around which feels a bit limp, but then the game does seem to have been primarily developed with the GBA in mind. Having it constantly available on the bottom screen isn’t even as big an advantage as I was expecting, and I found myself usually pausing the game and accessing it through the menu, like GBA players have to, rather than trying to analyse it while the game was still in play (and I was still open to attack).
Scurge has some catchy tunes but they’re not up to Metroid standards. Graphically things look clear and colourful, though they’re identical to the GBA game so don’t really push the power of the DS.
The game is about twelve hours long, which is four more than it needed to be and the end boss is a bit of a cock shiner. Other than that, there isn’t a great deal to say about Scurge: Hive. It’s not a bad game, but it’s not very memorable either. Anybody looking for a Metroid style game that (for some reason) isn’t Metroid will probably enjoy it.
5/10
0 Yorumlar