I first noticed this game was been developed in late 2008. An opened world GTA clone set in the Nevada Desert in the sixties. You are a Vietnam vet who is a leader of renegade biker gang on a revenge mission. The missions involve fist fighting, bike riding and shooting. It all sounded hopeful and a little bit exciting. So nearly five years later, with a development time of a Nasa Space program, I was thinking surely this game is going to be fantastic. At last a possible rival who will come along to knock off Rockstar’s North GTA crown.So you can imagine that it is to my great surprise when after playing the game for just half an hour, my girlfriend and my two dogs, witness the following outburst.
“PLEASE MAKE THIS STOP…AHHH…HE WON”T STOP SHAKING…(cries)…I’M GOING TO BE SICK…NO YOU IDIOT POINT THE GUN…WHY GOD? WHY?...(cries and whimpers)…THE HORROR…THE HORROR….”
Yes you get the idea; this isn’t going to be a pleasant review.
Where to start? In the first few seconds of the game you are placed behind a large gun and have to shoot some thugs. I died one more second later for no reason whatsoever. You do this somehow and then there’s a loading screen. Then you are driving your bike for a minute or two, then there’s a loading screen, then you are fighting someone for some reason that is unclear, then there’s a loading screen. Throughout the game the loading screens happen so frequently that you feel that you are playing an old commodore 64 game. A loading screen seems to occur even when you turn a corner in a corridor. But much worse then that is the cut scene. Dear me the horror. The voice over work is a travesty; the actors are either bored, drugged or thought they were doing another job. The dialogue itself must have been written by a bunch of monkeys in a room who were given typewriters for some kind of scientific experiment. There are massive pauses…between…each…line…of…dialogue…for…no…reason. The cut scenes are some of the worse I’ve ever witnessed and oddly look even worse graphically then the actual gameplay itself. Which I am sorry to say isn’t very hard. There are a lot of sex scenes, which might excite some of you out there. You know who you are. But if you’re into weird dead eyed grinding with a woman who looks very bored, accompanied by a awful piano soundtrack then this game is right up your street. I soon was shouting at the TV in another of my outbursts “PLEASE NO MORE SEX”, making the neighbor’s look at my girlfriend in a funny way all week.
Graphically and gameplay wise the game is a disaster from start to finish. It’s look like a sub PS2 game, which would really look out of place in 1999. The worse crime of all is that it is completely and utterly broken. How they have the nerve to release a game that is not finished with all the bugs, crashes and broken dialogue is beyond me. Here are some examples: Characters can suddenly disappear before your very eyes. The story abruptly jumps forward so you are have no idea how you got somewhere. You main character suffers from constant shaking when you are just standing still, hence making you feel sick to play. You can die suddenly without any known reason, or you have to repeat like I did sliding under a lorry about one hundred times.
The shooting sections are near impossible. The crosshair slips around like an eel on heat. When you do find your target, you will find that if you don’t get a headshot, your going to have to put at least twenty bullets into an enemy before they fall. Sometimes even when you get a headshot that doesn’t work and it takes four of five before they find it in their hearts to fall down dead. There are ranges of weapons from rifles to pistol, but they are all as bad as each other to use. Fighting is the more effective bit of the game and sort of works when compared to the other aspects of the gameplay. But once again there is no skill involved just bashing away at the buttons randomly.
The riding sections on the bike are a mixture of driving, jumping over crates, fighting rival bike gangs and chasing a boss. These sections are very boring and frustrating as there is sometimes also a time limit to these sections. This is also broken. One time I had forty seconds left to catch a guy and the game suddenly tells me I had run out of time and the mission has failed. Cue more shouting. Fighting on the bikes against other bikers, are just basically QTE button bashing and soon tires very quickly. You will never come off your bike but rather just bounce off the sides of things. There was probably not enough time to make another graphic for falling off the bike; I mean they only had 5 YEARS.
Now the missions and story itself are pretty much irrelevant because they the game is so bad. You chase someone on a bike, badly kill someone badly and endure some badly made cut scenes. There is some element of open exploration, but it is so empty and void of interest that I found it easier to stand in the middle of the street looking depressed. Yes you can have conversations with dead eyed people, buy and upgrade terrible weapons etc.…. but why, for the love of everything that is good ,would you even bother.
CONCLUSION
I have enjoyed a lot of games in my nearly thirty years of playing some good, some bad, but nothing can hold a candle to how terrible this is. The mechanics are so wrecked that there is such lack of finesse and presentation that it will make your eyes bleed. The gameplay is frustrating with no incentive to want to progress to the end of the game. I will be honest with you, I only played eight hours of gameplay, and I didn’t get to the end. I couldn’t do it, it was too hard and I cried too much. Unless the game suddenly turns into something absolutely amazing towards the end and I missed it. If that happened , ignore everything I just said, build an effigy of me, curse me and burn me next bonfire night. But I will bet you my life that this is not the case and the game is the same mess throughout. I will say this now it front of you all, “THIS IS THE WORST GAME IN THE WORLD”
The Lost Island
