GAME: Bedlam The Game by Christopher Brookmyre
RELEASED: UNFORTUNATELY!!!
This is simply put one of the easiest and quickest reviews I'll ever have to do. Bedlam is absolutely awful. I would not even look at this game unless you have an almost fetish-like addiction to first person shooters that were made in the 90s and ran on computers that just couldn't hack it. As duty states I must go on about the game and what it has to offer, but if I was to generalize this, it's all crap.
To give it the full name, Bedlam The Game by Christopher Brookmyre is a mystery. The reason being is that I have no actual idea as to how this got past the stringent Xbox quality checks. It looks like someone painted some cardboard and stuck them in an alpha build of Quake. In this day and age where there are dash buttons, aiming on all weapons and what have you, you don't expect in 2015 to be playing something resembling a dog's breakfast. Graphically I can understand what they're trying to do, but even with that being said, it is just horrific. The fake pixelation would not have been there at the time, as all old PC shooters, regardless of how lacking their textures were, had solid and sharp polygons. This simply doesn't. The characters are pretty awful, but then they aren't the only things.
The voice acting is absolutely horrendous. If you could picture a stereotype for a Glaswegian woman that you wouldn't want to meet on a Saturday night then you would roughly be describing our main character in the game. All of the voices are a bit over the top and the actual dialogue tries too hard to be funny via toilet humour, with various mention of certain skins and so on (I don't want to go into too much detail) it just feels like these crappy jokes are in to take your mind off the rest of it.
The AI isn't much better. Some of them will just walk along in their own thoughts, totally ignoring the fact you're about 4 feet behind them. The fake Deathmatch mode proves this far too easily. The bland enemies don't make it easy to hit them either because they're just so hard to see in certain areas.
So lemme see, non responsive AI, graphics that would embarrass a calculator, vocal work that was done in a job centre during their lunch break and an overall feeling of your life sapping out of your body as you move the analogue sticks. I'm sorry, but I don't ever remember 90's shooters being like this. Medal of Honor, Unreal, Doom, Quake and many others had so much more to offer than this tripe. Hell, even some areas in Bedlam slow down to the point where there are some major frame rate issues and that is just simply inexcusable in this day and age. There was one mission where I had to take out three observation towers and when the final two were being sorted out, the game nearly ground to a complete standstill.
I just can't recommend this in any way, shape or form. I'm embarrassed that I have to give this thing a review score and if I could get away with giving it 0 I bloody would. It gets one for at least trying to reignite mature gamer memories of days gone by, but Id rather buy Doom or wait for the new one next year from Bethesda. There are so many better shooters out there and bearing in mind that Titanfall's Deluxe Edition was available for under a tenner, you just can't recommend this at all.
Buy something, anything out of an Xbox One bargain bin in a shop than plucking this game from your currency stash. This is the shortest review I've done in a long time, but there really is nothing I can say that is positive about it, so do yourself a favour and avoid.
There may be other parts to this game that could elevate it to a hefty 2 stars, but you're so fed up after the first part you can't be bothered to find out.
SERIOUSLY..... JUST DON'T!!!!
Thanks to the Xbox Community for the chance to review this.