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| Azreal's Tear Review (fin) by Bill Dungsroman 07/21/2003, 4:20pm PDT | ||||
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| Azrael’s Tear Review
The First Person To Use A Monty Python Joke Gets It In The ‘Nads Azrael’s Tear (AT) is a first-person action/adventure game that is short on adventure and nearly in absentia with action. The title evidently is a metaphor for something, but it beats me what it is, since the objective of the game is to go back in time (from the future, even) and steal the Holy Grail, which I’ve never heard called Azrael’s Tear. Because Azrael is the Angel of Death and the Grail preserves life? I know jack shit about Christian theology so it’s lost on me, but I can’t imagine it’s very clever if some idiot game developer thought of it. In the game you play a thief – excuse me, Raptor – from the future who uses some bullshit technology to travel back into the past and steal the Grail, for some reason tritely laid out in the game’s manual. Is there anything fucking lazier than game developers who put the entire plot of a game on page one of its manual? They don’t even elaborate on it much in the game itself, thanks for fucking nothing. Even a porn movie has plot elements actually in the film, assholes. Ah, whatever, where’s the first puzzle? The Insufferable Blandness Of Teleological Game Design AT is unbelievably poorly made in terms of setting and design. Why bother with the whole “from the future-future†bit? Ultima IV sent me to Brittanica using an old gypsy lady slipping me a Mickey, who gives a flip about some lame “future†technocrap you’re supposed to have? All that you get out of it is a throwaway rationale for time travel and a shitty bulky game interface they cleverly call your “HUD.†You can look at shit and your built-in tricorder or whatever analyzes it and gives you a sentence or two of pointless exposition about it (more on that later). As for your superduper futuristic space ray gun: it’s a fucking sniper rifle, which fires what seem to be normal bullets. One thing that scares me about the future, though: simply walking and performing any other action is apparently unbelievably difficult – or maybe this game just has a piss-poor interface. How does holding down the right mouse button just to look around sound? How about having to hold down the right mouse button and hold down the left mouse button just to move? I hope you have a big mouse pad, because you’ll be zinging your mouse off the edge of your desk trying to move around in AT. I’d love to see this interface modded for Unreal Tournament or something, and just sit there and watch dozens of players careen wildly about in drunken circles, plowing into walls and hitting nothing except by accident, and getting killed because they have to stop and stand completely still to shoot their weapons (or is that how UT plays anyway?). Oh yeah, and you need to hit the Shift key to run, and the Space Bar to toggle between normal and combat modes (like you really fucking needed two different modes). I kept mixing the keys up, so I’d try to run and accidentally enter combat mode or vice-versa. Not that it mattered much, this game is boring and moves at a crippled snail’s pace most of the time. It still pissed me off, though. Speaking of setting, why the fuck do I use my time machine to go back in time to some imaginary point long after the Grail had been secured and guarded by the Knights Templar? Why not well before then, when it was just in some cave with Sir Gawain or whothefuckever, or even before that? What, is some sword-swinging Middle Ages faggot going to stop me? I HAVE A FUTURISTIC SNIPER RIFLE AND A HUD, DON’T TEST ME LAUNCELOT. Instead, you have to infiltrate some underground hellhole full of the dipshit Templar Knights and other stuff, like fish and dinosaurs. You read that right. Don’t ask, I’m not really sure except that maybe Jesus’ drool cup brought the random rock formations that dinosaur bones are supposed to be back to their nonexistent lives. I told you this game sucked. (SS: AT001. Caption: “A giant underground lake with a cargo ship in it. Yeah, right. One of your more tenacious enemies, a large fish, is by the boat. He’s like one polygon, but it’s ALL BAD.â€) Count The Lies: Azrael’s Tear Is A Fun And Involving Action/Adventure Game Anyway, you go back in time and appear inside some weird tunnel and your quest begins. But guess what? Other Raptors from the future are trying to get the Grail, so you’ll need to outwit and/or eliminate your competition. Not really, since you find almost all of them dead anyway, except one right at the beginning who you get to shoot, and another one later on who you don’t necessarily have to shoot. It’s laughably easy to kill the first one, you see him standing there with his thumb up his ass and he never notices you unless you run past him like an idiot. All you have to do is enter combat mode, aim your crosshair at his stupid helmet (he – and you, I assume – look like those Death Star troopers from Star Wars), and bang he’s toast. Enjoy your Confirmed Kill, since you only shoot three people in the whole game: Fuzznuts at the beginning, another Raptor besides him (but you’re better off letting a dinosaur eat him) and Tollum, who has the gayest fucking voice I’ve ever heard from a character who’s supposed to be a big hulking warrior. He sounds like Charlie in the Box from that Rankin-Bass stop-action Rudolph and the Island of Misfit Toys show. His voice alone ruins what is otherwise pretty decent voice acting in the game. (SS: AT002, Caption: “Ha ha! You call that toy a gun? Nice try, buckethead!â€) Oh yeah, and you have to find a different gun to kill Tollum: your high-tech sniper rifle can’t pierce his armor, but some old-ass elephant gun can. You can shoot any other human character in the game if you want, except that they’re all VITALLY IMPORTANT and you can’t finish the game if you do. Everything else dies in some other contrived adventure game manner. Other enemies include those dinosaurs, giant scorpions and a fish. Could there be a more random collection of enemies in a game developed outside of Japan? The fish has to be killed through a sequence of barely-intuitive actions that come off like a Rube Goldberg puzzle minus the cleverness and entertainment value. The dinosaurs, called Theos and Leos for no apparent reason by the knights (I guess they can’t call the velociraptors “raptors,†can they?), have to be killed by some convoluted manner as well, so killing them is more like solving a puzzle than by using twitchy reflexes and good aim. You’re just pulling levers and getting them to run into another room where something else will kill it, like a fall or poison gas. Anything but your gun, anything at all but that. (SS: AT003. Caption: “Killing dinosaurs is a complex matter. Imagine the idiot slipping is you and the sleeping dog is your excitement level. Which one’s the dinosaur? Does it matter?â€) Here We Go Again This game has plenty of puzzles, and most of them are fairly intuitive and congruent with the story, I guess. A fair portion of them are kind of stupid, however. Here you go mixing shit in an alchemy room and fiddling with pipes and what-fucking-not. One of the first big puzzles is to get a mining car to work, which takes too long to figure out. Some of the puzzles even involve baking. Yes, nothing builds eerie tension like baking fucking biscuits and wafers. Another large puzzle involves finding stupid shields scattered throughout the joint. Some require solving several puzzles in sequence to get, meanwhile others are just sort of sitting somewhere in a room, easy as hell to get. The game is sort of divided up into subsections so that you’ll find yourself backtracking endlessly over the same boring-ass hallways and rooms. For added fun, it’s a virtual guarantee that every fucking door you’ll come across will be locked and will stay locked for awhile. Half the doors you see in the beginning of the game won’t be unlocked until about halfway through. You’ll eventually open them from the other side, and your excitement at entering a new area will drain away as you realize you’re back in that stupid room with the narrow wooden floorboards again. All of your futuristic equipment CAN’T GET YOU THROUGH A LOCKED FUCKING WOODEN DOOR, but your HUD can helpfully tell you it’s made of wood. What’s worse, some areas of the game are nothing but retarded filler places that serve no purpose. Imagine an important-looking gigantic hive-like foresty thing that is utterly and completely pointless from a gameplay perspective, as it turns out. I wasted who knows how long in there, looking for whatever the hell it was I thought I was supposed to find or do. Oh yeah, plenty of jumping and twitch-movement puzzles, too. Giant swinging clock pendulums, anyone? (SS: AT004. Caption: “Here’s a room you will walk through about a billion times. If you fall off the narrow boards you will immediately drown. That door? Locked.â€) Wasn’t There Anything To Like About This Stupid Game? The edgy notion that all the honorable knights who remained and stood guard over the Holy Grail were just religiously-deluded dopes who ended up mutated and insane and doomed – not privileged – to live forever in some dank shithole is a new thought. Although, again, the setting begs the question of why your character is from the future and why does he have to go back in time? According to the game, right this moment those idiot knights are knocking around in their dank underground lair. They aren’t going anywhere – finding them in the present time is a hell of a lot more plausible. I mean, what are you missing by not being from the future? A stupid HUD that tells you nothing a simple text narrative couldn’t, a dorky space suit that doesn’t even protect you from poisonous gas, and a sniper rifle that is only good for piercing armor from the future. Fuck that, I’ll tap my Vietnam vet uncle for some hardware and we’ll see how tough those dinosaurs are against frag grenades. I find it very fucking hard to believe those Templar Knights built that place, a jumbled mishmash of Middle-Age architecture, some pretty contemporary looking stuff (like the electronic mining equipment) and some highly improbable shit like giant moving rock platforms. One of these guys is so dumb he blew his own head off mixing gunpowder, are you trying to tell me they put this joint together? What, did Jesus help? I heard he was a pretty good carpenter. (SS: AT005. Caption: “One of the many weird puzzles. Below is some kind of Crusades-era prayer room. Bottom left are mechanical controls. Who the hell built this place?â€) Some bits in the game are alright. The ghost of a poor girl who was killed by something nasty haunts a room in the game, pining for her lover. I nearly jumped out of my grimy boxers when I turned and looked up at some poor fucker hanging from the mast of a ship, and then he started talking to me. Some of the artwork is pretty well done, even for an older game. Most of it is awful however, especially the Grail itself, which is fucking stupid looking. All that for what looks like a fucking Origami fold-up slate gray goblet? The game appears to be made using the Quake 1 engine, so you’ve got all these cracks in the walls where textures don’t match up and an embarrassingly low poly count for the characters. There is a story here, and it isn’t all that bad for an adventure game. Conversations in the game aren’t too stupid, but the dialog trees are a little clunky and kind of long. A lot of back story for the Knights and all, which is good since you don’t get much story for your own character beyond whatever horseshit was in the manual. And the ending was anticlimactic to say the fucking least. A title bar that said “YOU HAVE WON†wouldn’t have been much worse. What’s The Verdict? The adventure game genre is all but dead, so anyone who still enjoys these stupid games (I still pretend to) is going to end up playing just about anything. AT qualifies as an adventure game, so feel free to play it if you really need an adventure game fix. It’s got Myst-y puzzles, some decent dialogue, and nearly zero action. This game could actually have been a Myst clone, with all the extraneous “action†bits removed and rigid talking heads for characters and no one would have noticed or cared. If the retards who made it had thought of it a year before they actually did, I think it would have been. I think it was shoehorned into FPS 3D since Quake was such a big hit, or something. Meanwhile, nobody who plays adventure games gives a shit about that. If you do play, you’ll have to get used to the shitty interface and retarded movement controls, the dumbest this side of Daggerfall. Whatever, you’re mostly clomping around the exact same halls and rooms endlessly, who cares what you have to do to move around? |
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