*special thanks to Steve C for providing my no-life having ass with these games to review*
Alrighty then, on with the review. RLH pits you, exiled military type Nick Connor, against a breed of fast thinking, moving and killing aliens that have just overrun your space station and killed just about everyone and everything. From what I understand, RLH has been in development forever. Like, YEARS. You may ask yourself “aren’t really AWESOME games like Metal Gear and Final Fantasy in development for years?” And I’d say yes, they are. But much like my inability to come with a witty metaphor right now, there are exceptions to every rule. After playing RLH, I asked myself… “is this really the result of YEARS of work?”
RLH has some good points, and don’t worry I’ll get to them, but there are a few outstanding flaws. First of all the camera (which is quickly becoming a running annoyance in EVERY review I write) is all over the fucking place. In a 3-D game with extremely DANGEROUS enemies coming at you from every fucking angle, it’d be nice to see what’s hitting you every now and then. Second are the mind numbing puzzles where you have to hunt down the combination to specific door locks in order to progress through levels. The pieces of these combinations are usually scattered throughout levels forcing you to scour every inch of the environments. Sounds fun, but not the 5th time you’ve been through that fucking droid repair room looking for the last piece of the puzzle.
Ok, onto the good stuff. The atmosphere and pacing are really well done. The dread of knowing that there COULD be a killer alien around every corner really adds to the experience. Furthermore, the fact that your main gun NEVER runs out of ammo helps the alien killing all the more. Follow this up with a pretty cool weapon modification system and we’re rockin and rollin. Rounding out the good points of RLH are the voice actors. Granted it’s no GTA:VC, but the presence of Lance Henriksen (The Terminator, Aliens) and Kate Mulgrew (Capt. Janeway from Star Trek, but you knew that you fucking dorks) really adds life to the story. While the camera and gameplay left a little to be desired, the story really made me want to play through the game just to see what happened.
Overall, I’d recommend renting RLH before buying it. It’s a solid title but falls short in a few categories (camera, gameplay mechanics).
