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| Psi-Ops (actual review, sadly sans screenshots) by curst 09/01/2004, 4:20pm PDT | ||||
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| Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy will easily keep me amused until I've saved up enough to buy a PC that can run Doom 3 at max settings.
The story is something along these lines: some government agency funds a project to investigate psychic abilites and how they can be used in battle. The guy leading the project goes too far! He's ordered to stop. He doesn't stop! He instead goes renegade and vows vengeance, I guess. You were a subject in this project, so you have all these kickass psychic abilities. You are to go undercover to crush the renegades, but they know how to scan for psychic powers, thus you are forced to get your memory wiped somewhat so that you can't access the powers. Then once you've gotten "inside", you'll run into an undercover hottie who'll use a drug to unlock them again (but is she part of the CONSPEARASEEEEEEE referenced in the title?! or are YOU?! who knows!). That's as good a story as I can think of to explain why you start the game as a psychic dude with no psychic powers, but unlock them as you progress. Jay Shilling take note: I don't know what my character's name is, let alone I've already forgotten any and all of the plot developments I've seen thus far, because the game is good enough to render me incapable of caring about that. You eagerly anticipated HL2 mod needs two things: less names, more fun. GO. So no, the story's not terribly compelling, nor does it NEED to be. At first it might not seem that way, because this game really plays almost identically to Midway's The Suffering, minus any horror elements. I think it's the same engine and everything. You run around a la Max Payne, taking out sucka MCs with a pistol, and general act bored. That on its own wouldn't hold up for very long. But luckily it gets good pretty quickly. Actually, it gets great. Very few are the games that have made this strong a case for devs to fucking forget about the story and concentrate on making a good game. What could cause Psi-Ops to suddenly rule so much? Psychic powers. You start with TELEKINESIS. (Note to SS2 fans: sadly Psi-Ops is not highbrow to call it CEREBRO-INITIATED MATTER TRANSPORTATION. You won't like this game.) And holy shit, this seems to work on everything! No, really, aside from being unable to open locked doors with it, or ripping entire catwalks out of their foundation, I do mean everything. See a crate? (And yes, you will see them - I haven't measured the StC explicitly but I remember it being pretty low. Psi-Ops breaks the rules by managing to not suck despite that.) You get to play the role of someone who can use psychic powers to FUCK SHIT UP by throwing that crate into a patrolling guard's chest to bowl him over. Then you can pick up and drop a flaming barrel on him. All from 40+ feet away. Or maybe your target is on a catwalk that hovers over a long distance. Replace "throw crate into guard" with "pick up guard and slam him into the wall a few times until the walls are wallpapered in red then drop him to his death"... it's pretty much just as fun. That's right, there are multiple paths to approaching each section of the game! And unlike Deus Ex, none of the alternate solutions involve crawling around in access tunnels, or pressing the Hack button to read someone's email. It's more along the lines of, "do I want to kill that guy in this totally awesome way or that not-quite-as-awesome way?" And what might be the best use of crates ever besides using them to bowl enemies over? Stand on a crate, then use telekinesis to lift it so that even very high ledges are now in easy reach. The devs swear that like Quake 1's rocket jumping, this was not programmed into the game, and they only decided to design levels to take advantage of it after discovering this neat side-effect of the physics engine. It even leaves a little bit of room for mini-games a la GTA3. Speaking of physics! Fussbett's First Law Of Ragdoll Physics is further solidified by Psi-Ops, as it uses, you know, ragdoll physics. Ragdoll physics + using telekinesis to fling enemy guards around like a racquetball = holy shit I just expended all my psychic power just battering this one guy around because it was so damn cool. Nurture your inner sadist. Back to the powers - next comes REMOTE SEEING. Eh, let's skip this since it's useful but not terribly fun. What comes next is easily the best single gameplay element ever invented since telekinesis & ragdoll physics... Third power: PYROKINESIS. Do you throw fireballs at enemies that do 2d6 points of damage a la SS2's "Projected Pyrokinesis"? No. What you do in Psi-Ops is YOU SET PEOPLE ON FUCKING FIRE WITH YOUR FUCKING MIND. For real, one press of a button and suddenly the poor guard (side note: they're called "meat puppets" - I don't know why I like that so much) is completely 100% TOTALLY on fire and running around screaming and all that shit, probably setting several other things on fire as they kareem wildly into various objects since they aren't paying any attention to where they're frantically running, like maybe his buddies on patrol with him or maybe some barrels or crates (which, I should note, are remarkably easy to set alight). It's like, the devs realized that setting people on fire was great fun in and of itself, but it'd be even better if every time you did so you set off some kind of chain reaction almost as impressive than the one that kickstarted the cycle of life on Earth. It's too bad that this phenomenon isn't fully realized by tossing exploding barrels and hordes of fifty-plus people into the mix, but it IS a PS2 game so perhaps hardware limitations are to blame. There's other powers like mind control and invisibility and shit, plus you can make people's heads explode by sucking psi-power out of them (or, if you prefer, by taking over their mind and then forcing them to commit suicide), but for me the list basically ends with telekinesis and pyrokinesis. Unless you're some kind of GODDAMN FRUIT you'll feel the same way. I notice that a lot of Creexul's reviews here include something along the lines of an "MP-5 Rating", and after watching a recent episode of Mail Call with R. Lee Ermey, I'm inclined to agree that this should be part-and-parcel of every review of every game ever. Tragically, in the case of Psi-Ops: MP-5 RATING: n/a (Unless I just haven't found one yet.) But thankfully, the disappointment that stems from the lack of MP-5s is at least somewhat, or actually 100%, mitigated by the psi-powers. Every time I go in a room, I think "time to grab that MP-5 that I hav.... er, that I don't have, oh no! okay, let me just set everything on fire then". That's basically the entire game, at least when I play it. You enter a room, you wave your hand a couple of times, and suddenly everyone around you is like HOLY SHIT OUCH WHY WON'T THE SPRINKLER SYSTEM ACTIVATE AND WAIT WHY AM I SPINNING AROUND IN MID-AIR *thud* *sizzle*. I know there's some kind of backstory here, but have I cared beyond the moment where I acquired the pyrokinesis power? No. This game is easily worth a rental at the very least, and that's only if you harbor a seething, rabid hatred of good action games. Otherwise, buy. |
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