Curse

Written by Phillip Ellis on 7/22/2004 for Xbox  

Every now and then the gaming world sees an adventure game brought to us. The problem with adventure games is that they are just long cut scenes and no actual game play. The one thing Curse does right is set itself apart from the genre in the manner of play. It is still an adventure game, it still has the story, but there is a lot more to the game play than just random cut scenes. The control is different from other games. Rather than just being an adventure game it has that third-person shooter style.

You play the game as Dr. Dane’s son. Dr. Dane died after owning the Eye of the Isis, an ancient artifact sought out by many in the game. The Eye of the Isis is thought to cause death or other problems with it’s owners. The game starts in 1890 in England at a museum. The British Police have sealed off the entrance to the museum and told you that you cannot go in. Without any regard to that, Darien Dane walks into the museum, only to find the very reason he was meant to be out. There are times in the game that you will control another character, Victoria Sutton, because Darien is under the curse. While this may not seem that significant, it is actually a nice change of pace to be controlling another character for some time. Your object is to keep a group of thugs from stealing the Eye of Isis, and along the way you will battle the horrific walking dead. The story is given to you little by little as you continue playing the game. Unfortunately the storyline is better than the game.

The graphics of the game at times will leave a lot to be desired, and at other times is pretty well represented. The characters are not done as well as they could have been, and there are some sync issues with the speaking of the characters and their movement. Aside from the few problems the graphics will suffer at times, they are pretty average compared to most games nowadays. However, aside from the characters, when you begin looking at the background at which you are standing, those graphics are done wonderfully. The background is done extremely well, giving you the feeling that you are watching a horror flick at night. The graphics appear to be done as if this were a budget game. They could have been done a lot better, but fortunately for the sake of playing through it once, they were not worse.

The game play is pretty typical of most of your action games, where you must find something to get to the next area. The control of the user character is pretty horrid occasionally. He moves around like a tractor-trailer, which is not good at all. Part of the reason you cannot move your character in the ways that you want is because of an annoying camera which likes to randomly change its direction at times. Usually I am one to be excited about playing a new game, but I never could get up for this one like most of the others. The game just never had the right stuff at the same time to keep me into it. The enemy is predictable at best, and downright bad. If you actually enjoyed playing through the game the first time, there will not be a second time. This game has almost no replay value. It is one-sided, there is nothing that will change from the first time you went through it. The adventure game lacks the twists and turns that a very good adventure game would have, and this is one of the reasons the game is lacking. In the game you carry a regular arsenal of weapons, and the developers at least included guns from the era of the game rather than me running around with a Tommy Gun blasting through the entire level. My personal favorite weapon is the crossbow. There is something about shooting a zombie with a crossbow that seems satisfying. There is also a flamethrower located in the game if you wish to burn your zombies back to the dead. There are a few other weapons in there too for your appetite. There is also a shotgun, baton, pistol, and a mortar firing gun here. Going into a battle against a zombie with a baton is definitely not the smartest thing to do since they are usually accommodated with weapons the size of your head. It is actually sort of funny to stand there and try to beat them with a baton while they viciously decapitate you in every place on your body.

In a horror game, the sound has to be dead on for the game to hit its stride. Fortunately here, the sound is actually a bright spot in the game. You begin to hear music when you are near an enemy, and the sound of footsteps walking on the cement leaves you at the edge of your seat. While the sounds may leave you on the edge of your seat, there is not much else. The sound does not follow through, it does not provide the knockout punch, it is just average again. At first thoughts the sound is great, and it is decent, but they are just missing one aspect to make it great. It is one of those things that you cannot put your finger on to find, but it needs to deliver more.

To say that this game is bad would not be putting it in the correct terms. The game is not bad. It just is not good either. The controls and camera are too awkward and too clumsy to ever get adjusted to. Rather they will leave you yelling at your television in disgust. While the game tries to distance itself from the former Resident Evil and Silent Hill games with a different twist on the storyline, there just is not enough here to tell the games apart. If you crave that type of game, well, there are not many left like it, and this may be enough to hold you over until something new comes out. If anything it is a worthy game for a rental to enjoy over a weekend. The storyline takes around ten hours to beat, not nearly enough time to justify buying it since you cannot play through it again. So if you are looking for a horror game or just a decent adventure game then you cannot really go wrong here. Just do not buy it expecting the same thing as Resident Evil once was, because you certainly will not find that here.