Muckraker Posts: 285 Joined: 29 Apr 2008 | Boiling Point: Road to Hell. It is not only a completely uninformative Title, that seems to have arisen from the Throw-random-words-that-sound-cool-together School of Titeling, unfortunately it's also followed by a game that resembles its quality.
But before I go one ranting about the game, allow me to explain why I got so angry when it turned out to be crap, I mean crappy games are actually rather the rule than the exception. The reason why I found Boiling Point so truly disturbing is the fact that it actually had a lot of potential, but all the theoratically good ideas where systematically ruined by a developer who would probably have a better chance of making a good game if they would write a random series of ones and zeros.
The first good idea was the concept behind the game which can probably be best summarised as a mixture of Far Cry and Grand Theft Auto mixed with some RPG elements. This already sounds like a recipe to instant success and the developers must have thought the same, because thinking that they would already have succeeded is the only reason I can think of for how they systematically ruined everything from then on. The anticipation that this concept had brought up in me lasted about 2 minutes, 1 minute and 59 seconds of which were spend staring at the loading screen. At this point it is my dubious pleasure of describing you the worst intro sequence that I ever saw:
Behold Lisa Myers, the daughter of Saul Myers, the protagonist, as she is desperately calling her Daddy because she is in danger. She then is abducted during said conversation and of course you set out to rescue her. At this point it doesn't sound that bad, but I haven't mentioned the fact that said intro is occasionally paused to show sentences, designed to hammer the most important plot points into our brains baseball-bat style. I quote literally: "Saul Myers is ex-military" "His daughter is abducted" "He is about to hit the boiling point".
This is not what I would call good storytelling. The bad intro sequence is not the only thing the story is suffering from. Saul Myers egg-shaped bold skull is apparently emptier than a vacuum, and while my big ego allows me to play muscular, tough badasses, that can fire any weapon and drive any vehicle they lay their eyes on, I do have a problem with playing a dumbass. For example after you arrive in Realia (which was initially called Columbia until Columbia complained about that, which I can totally understand, I mean I wouldn't want to be associated with this game) you are told that a Mafia Boss called Don Pedro is probably the one who abducted your daughter, but after you force your way into his villa and have him with your gun on his forehead, all he has to say to convinve Saul (because he didn't really convinve me) is, literally: I didn't do it. One not really surprising plot twist later it of course turns out that he is not as innocent as he made you belief and you once again force your way into his villa, and again have him with your gun on his forehead. This time he, again literally, shouts: "Look behind you" which Saul does and he runs away. Part of the Problem may be that I am more intellingent than the average gamer, so this could probably work in the U.S.,but I somehow don't see them paying money for being able to control a gun-wielding ugly bastard with the iq of a three year old when they have this "pleasure" everyday in their life.
Being a member of the ancient mystical cult of "Games are Art", I was royally disappointed by the story, but I couldn't call myself a gamer if I would only play games with a good story because that would leave me with only four to five games, so let's talk about the gameplay.
The game does not only offer a considerably large free world set in a jungle environment, but also three major and four minor factions that you can choose to work for between the "real" (read: main story) missions. Once again it sounded good before I actually tried it: Choosing your favorite faction, doing some minor and major errands for them, rising in their respect while pissing everyone else of and being rewarded with money and weapons and stuff. Too bad that this feature also is absolutely terribly executed. First off, the reward you get for a mission doesn't resemble said missions difficulty. I often found myself carrying a parcel for 15 metres and being showered in money and weapons and useful items, while clearing out an entire camp of baddies will just get you a pat on the back or a friendly handshake. Secondly, it's harder to earn money and find weapons by doing missions than by just watching one of the randomly spawned battles between two of the factions and looting their bodies. Thirdly, members of neutral or even allied factions will every once in a while attack you for no reason, which leaves you with the choice of fleeing and losing a little bit of respect with that faction without any fault, or to return fire and loose even more. Fourthly, the missions suffer from the same problem many parts of it's world have, repetition. Most missions follow the scheme of Do/Go/Kill that/there/that guy.
As for the free world aspect, someone should have explained to the dev team that you also have to fill your world with interesting content. Everything in Boiling Point has apperantly been generated and not built by hand, except for places that are important for missions, but the tiny number of such spots just makes it laughable, because you can bet your ass that any place that doesn't look like the generic tropical landscape will be important at some point in the future, and the exact same thing applies for characters. Not only has this country only got a handful of people who actually have a name, but all of them will also be important to the main storyline.
The weaponry consists of the usual lineup of pistol, machine gun, crossbow, sniper rifle, rocket launcher and jam. That's right jam can be used as a weapon, more precisely it can be used to lure deadly tropical bees to an unsuspecting NPC. Except for this surprise everything has been seen a few hundred times before, the only new feature being the degree to which it's flawed. All weapons feel much to weak, recoilwise, and their projectiles draw lines through the air so long it seems as if you were firing laser beams. The rocket launcher costs a fortune and has only one shot ( it's one of those one way rocketlaunchers that you drop after firing) and will never ever be needed until the unfair boss battle because the only thing you would need to use them against are helicopters, and they are so incredibly stupid that you will have a hard time hitting them with a rocket before they crash into a tree or even the ground. The crossbow is used as a stealth weapon, so whenever you use him on a bad guy you will get the message "Headshot- He didn't have time to scream" even if you shot his toe off. The only "new" Idea they put in was making it possible to upgrade your weapons, but this is once again ruined by the execution: These upgrades do not only cost a lot of money considering they have hardly any effect, you also have to either pay even more to have them installed for you or try yourself. If you do so however one of the very few RPG elements gets in your way when you realise that you have to learn upgrading, by doing it that is. However you only get better when you upgrade a weapon successfully and in the beginning the chance of that happening is about as big as the chance of a tossed coin landing on it's side. So the upgrading yourself feature can immediately forgotten, but also having your guns upgraded doesn't make much sense since the game also features weapon degredation.
I think you have all figured out until now that I'm not going to recommend Boiling Point. The games formula seems to be that one shitload of at best mediocre content will make up for 10-15 hours of interesting exciting content. But before I can rest my case, I have to add one last lethal bitchslap to the game: Let's talk about Bugs.
Trust me when I say that this game has more Bugs than Starship Troopers. Surprisingly I didn't despise the game too much for it, as a matter of fact I was having much more fun laughing about the endless amount of bugs, translation mistakes, lacks of logik, the untentionally hilarious story and NPCs having mental failures than actually playing the game. Allow me to give you a brief insight into the weird world of Boiling Point. First thing I have to mention is the german translation, which went royally awry. It's more than obvious that the developers have just run the english text through a translation program, and quite a bad one it must have been. I'm not going to bore you with descripitons of how the subtle beauty of the german language has been vomited on, but one thing should also be understandable for you english speakers out there: the part where the translation was just left out. I will have to go into detail a bit. The game features many possibilites of healing yourself: sleeping, eating, syringes, adrenaline, alcohol.
The last three have the downside of getting addicted which will let you loose health whenever youre not taking them and the only way of getting rid of said addiction is to talk to a doctor, now allow me to present the three choices I was in that conversation:
"Help me Doc. I have overdone the adrenaline."
"Help me Doc. I have overdone the 44"
"Help me Doc. I have overdone the 17"
You might think that they got at least one of three right, but the choosing adrenaline caused the doctor to free me of any addiction to alcohol. Those mistakes definetly don't help to improve the already badly written dialogues. The landscape in Boiling Point features many rivers and lakes, the first time I tried to swim in one I painfully made the acquintance of piranhas, so I fled out of the water and thought myself safe there, which I was, at least until the piranhas glided out of the water and started persuing me floating mid-air. Having learned from that encounter I tried to explore the lake with a ship, just to find out that they turn upside-down when anything heavier than a butterfly leans against them, even if they are 20 metres long. But those ships can't be too heavy anyway, judging by the way Saul can even push large military ships for two to three meters without even touching them, which makes me wonder why he can only carry so agressively few items with him. Vehicles in general aren't Boiling Point's strenght, all cars in the game are too big so that when switching to 3rd Person you can watch Saul having to reach up for the steering wheel, hardly seeing anything, well turns out I haven't compared him with a three year old for nothing. Helicopters and Airplanes are never ever again being used after you have learned how to steer them, but the AI anyway tries to turn them into ground-based vehicles on every opportunity, which was only topped when I destroyed the Military's helicopters for the mafia and they didn't even notice the explosion in the middle of their camp and waved friendly while they opened the gates to let me out, which is more important than it sounds, since you can destroy the gates, but will hit an invisible wall the next time you try to drive through them. I also had a hard time finding that Military camps weapon merchant, because he is permanenly stuck inside a wall and therefore a little hard to see. But he was of no help anyway, because like every other merchant in the game he refused to buy the two mysterious items I had randomly found in the jungle, the magical cartridge that fits into no weapon and the unopenable suitcase. So I continued to follow the main storyline. I could go for hours swearing about the story but I think it's best described when I give you the description of the assasin that kills one of your informants: white, bald, large, tattoed, suit, sunglasses, one-eyed. Well if he was black he would only need a wooden leg to fulfill every single evil criminal stereotype there is. |
On the Record Posts: 5973 Joined: 7 Feb 2008 | Awesome review of a terrible game, it sounds like the VG equivalent of a B-Movie. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 3900 Joined: 4 May 2008 | That was actually the best review I've read all week. Good work. |
Pulitzer Laureate Posts: 887 Joined: 9 Jan 2008 | Now you just need to read it out really fast and have some visual puns. |
Muckraker Posts: 285 Joined: 29 Apr 2008 | Thanks for the kind words gang.
Now all I gotta do is find someone to pay me for reviewing games. |
Anonymous Source Posts: 5 Joined: 27 Jun 2008 | A odd coincidence that I have also been playing this game recently and thankfully my brother bought it so none of my cash wasted.
An excellent and witty review keep up the good work! |
Muckraker Posts: 350 Joined: 15 Jul 2008 | You sold it to your bro! That is low! |
Beat Writer Posts: 188 Joined: 10 Oct 2007 | Laughed hard at the floating piranha's, great review :) |
Boiling Point: Road to Hell. It is not only a completely uninformative Title, that seems to have arisen from the Throw-random-words-that-sound-cool-together School of Titeling, unfortunately it's also followed by a game that resembles its quality.
But before I go one ranting about the game, allow me to explain why I got so angry when it turned out to be crap, I mean crappy games are actually rather the rule than the exception. The reason why I found Boiling Point so truly disturbing is the fact that it actually had a lot of potential, but all the theoratically good ideas where systematically ruined by a developer who would probably have a better chance of making a good game if they would write a random series of ones and zeros.
The first good idea was the concept behind the game which can probably be best summarised as a mixture of Far Cry and Grand Theft Auto mixed with some RPG elements. This already sounds like a recipe to instant success and the developers must have thought the same, because thinking that they would already have succeeded is the only reason I can think of for how they systematically ruined everything from then on. The anticipation that this concept had brought up in me lasted about 2 minutes, 1 minute and 59 seconds of which were spend staring at the loading screen. At this point it is my dubious pleasure of describing you the worst intro sequence that I ever saw:
Behold Lisa Myers, the daughter of Saul Myers, the protagonist, as she is desperately calling her Daddy because she is in danger. She then is abducted during said conversation and of course you set out to rescue her. At this point it doesn't sound that bad, but I haven't mentioned the fact that said intro is occasionally paused to show sentences, designed to hammer the most important plot points into our brains baseball-bat style. I quote literally: "Saul Myers is ex-military" "His daughter is abducted" "He is about to hit the boiling point".
This is not what I would call good storytelling. The bad intro sequence is not the only thing the story is suffering from. Saul Myers egg-shaped bold skull is apparently emptier than a vacuum, and while my big ego allows me to play muscular, tough badasses, that can fire any weapon and drive any vehicle they lay their eyes on, I do have a problem with playing a dumbass. For example after you arrive in Realia (which was initially called Columbia until Columbia complained about that, which I can totally understand, I mean I wouldn't want to be associated with this game) you are told that a Mafia Boss called Don Pedro is probably the one who abducted your daughter, but after you force your way into his villa and have him with your gun on his forehead, all he has to say to convinve Saul (because he didn't really convinve me) is, literally: I didn't do it. One not really surprising plot twist later it of course turns out that he is not as innocent as he made you belief and you once again force your way into his villa, and again have him with your gun on his forehead. This time he, again literally, shouts: "Look behind you" which Saul does and he runs away. Part of the Problem may be that I am more intellingent than the average gamer, so this could probably work in the U.S.,but I somehow don't see them paying money for being able to control a gun-wielding ugly bastard with the iq of a three year old when they have this "pleasure" everyday in their life.
Being a member of the ancient mystical cult of "Games are Art", I was royally disappointed by the story, but I couldn't call myself a gamer if I would only play games with a good story because that would leave me with only four to five games, so let's talk about the gameplay.
The game does not only offer a considerably large free world set in a jungle environment, but also three major and four minor factions that you can choose to work for between the "real" (read: main story) missions. Once again it sounded good before I actually tried it: Choosing your favorite faction, doing some minor and major errands for them, rising in their respect while pissing everyone else of and being rewarded with money and weapons and stuff. Too bad that this feature also is absolutely terribly executed. First off, the reward you get for a mission doesn't resemble said missions difficulty. I often found myself carrying a parcel for 15 metres and being showered in money and weapons and useful items, while clearing out an entire camp of baddies will just get you a pat on the back or a friendly handshake. Secondly, it's harder to earn money and find weapons by doing missions than by just watching one of the randomly spawned battles between two of the factions and looting their bodies. Thirdly, members of neutral or even allied factions will every once in a while attack you for no reason, which leaves you with the choice of fleeing and losing a little bit of respect with that faction without any fault, or to return fire and loose even more. Fourthly, the missions suffer from the same problem many parts of it's world have, repetition. Most missions follow the scheme of Do/Go/Kill that/there/that guy.
As for the free world aspect, someone should have explained to the dev team that you also have to fill your world with interesting content. Everything in Boiling Point has apperantly been generated and not built by hand, except for places that are important for missions, but the tiny number of such spots just makes it laughable, because you can bet your ass that any place that doesn't look like the generic tropical landscape will be important at some point in the future, and the exact same thing applies for characters. Not only has this country only got a handful of people who actually have a name, but all of them will also be important to the main storyline.
The weaponry consists of the usual lineup of pistol, machine gun, crossbow, sniper rifle, rocket launcher and jam. That's right jam can be used as a weapon, more precisely it can be used to lure deadly tropical bees to an unsuspecting NPC. Except for this surprise everything has been seen a few hundred times before, the only new feature being the degree to which it's flawed. All weapons feel much to weak, recoilwise, and their projectiles draw lines through the air so long it seems as if you were firing laser beams. The rocket launcher costs a fortune and has only one shot ( it's one of those one way rocketlaunchers that you drop after firing) and will never ever be needed until the unfair boss battle because the only thing you would need to use them against are helicopters, and they are so incredibly stupid that you will have a hard time hitting them with a rocket before they crash into a tree or even the ground. The crossbow is used as a stealth weapon, so whenever you use him on a bad guy you will get the message "Headshot- He didn't have time to scream" even if you shot his toe off. The only "new" Idea they put in was making it possible to upgrade your weapons, but this is once again ruined by the execution: These upgrades do not only cost a lot of money considering they have hardly any effect, you also have to either pay even more to have them installed for you or try yourself. If you do so however one of the very few RPG elements gets in your way when you realise that you have to learn upgrading, by doing it that is. However you only get better when you upgrade a weapon successfully and in the beginning the chance of that happening is about as big as the chance of a tossed coin landing on it's side. So the upgrading yourself feature can immediately forgotten, but also having your guns upgraded doesn't make much sense since the game also features weapon degredation.
I think you have all figured out until now that I'm not going to recommend Boiling Point. The games formula seems to be that one shitload of at best mediocre content will make up for 10-15 hours of interesting exciting content. But before I can rest my case, I have to add one last lethal bitchslap to the game: Let's talk about Bugs.
Trust me when I say that this game has more Bugs than Starship Troopers. Surprisingly I didn't despise the game too much for it, as a matter of fact I was having much more fun laughing about the endless amount of bugs, translation mistakes, lacks of logik, the untentionally hilarious story and NPCs having mental failures than actually playing the game. Allow me to give you a brief insight into the weird world of Boiling Point. First thing I have to mention is the german translation, which went royally awry. It's more than obvious that the developers have just run the english text through a translation program, and quite a bad one it must have been. I'm not going to bore you with descripitons of how the subtle beauty of the german language has been vomited on, but one thing should also be understandable for you english speakers out there: the part where the translation was just left out. I will have to go into detail a bit. The game features many possibilites of healing yourself: sleeping, eating, syringes, adrenaline, alcohol.
The last three have the downside of getting addicted which will let you loose health whenever youre not taking them and the only way of getting rid of said addiction is to talk to a doctor, now allow me to present the three choices I was in that conversation:
"Help me Doc. I have overdone the adrenaline."
"Help me Doc. I have overdone the 44"
"Help me Doc. I have overdone the 17"
You might think that they got at least one of three right, but the choosing adrenaline caused the doctor to free me of any addiction to alcohol. Those mistakes definetly don't help to improve the already badly written dialogues. The landscape in Boiling Point features many rivers and lakes, the first time I tried to swim in one I painfully made the acquintance of piranhas, so I fled out of the water and thought myself safe there, which I was, at least until the piranhas glided out of the water and started persuing me floating mid-air. Having learned from that encounter I tried to explore the lake with a ship, just to find out that they turn upside-down when anything heavier than a butterfly leans against them, even if they are 20 metres long. But those ships can't be too heavy anyway, judging by the way Saul can even push large military ships for two to three meters without even touching them, which makes me wonder why he can only carry so agressively few items with him. Vehicles in general aren't Boiling Point's strenght, all cars in the game are too big so that when switching to 3rd Person you can watch Saul having to reach up for the steering wheel, hardly seeing anything, well turns out I haven't compared him with a three year old for nothing. Helicopters and Airplanes are never ever again being used after you have learned how to steer them, but the AI anyway tries to turn them into ground-based vehicles on every opportunity, which was only topped when I destroyed the Military's helicopters for the mafia and they didn't even notice the explosion in the middle of their camp and waved friendly while they opened the gates to let me out, which is more important than it sounds, since you can destroy the gates, but will hit an invisible wall the next time you try to drive through them. I also had a hard time finding that Military camps weapon merchant, because he is permanenly stuck inside a wall and therefore a little hard to see. But he was of no help anyway, because like every other merchant in the game he refused to buy the two mysterious items I had randomly found in the jungle, the magical cartridge that fits into no weapon and the unopenable suitcase. So I continued to follow the main storyline. I could go for hours swearing about the story but I think it's best described when I give you the description of the assasin that kills one of your informants: white, bald, large, tattoed, suit, sunglasses, one-eyed. Well if he was black he would only need a wooden leg to fulfill every single evil criminal stereotype there is.