No Escape Review

Time flies, boys and girls! Several months have already passed since the release of No Escape. No one can deny that the game struggled with bad network code and few game servers at the time - unfortunately. Has anything changed since then? Read on as we check out No Escape with Funcom's latest update for the game - patch #3.

Tested and written by Anders "Twilight" Steinlein, published 26th March 2001

Let me give you a quick rundown of what this game is all about. You are one of the contestants in the worlds most popular reality TV show. In a large studio orbiting our beloved planet, you and your competitors battle it out on small, virtual, completely spherical planets. With weapons ranging from the zapper to the plasma gun at your disposal, your goal is to kick their sorry ass in order to steal the money they leave behind.

That's what the single player game is all about. Trying to win the freakin' TV show. The fact that the computer controlled bots are exceptionally dumb doesn't really make it any more fun. On top of that, the lack of a save game option is quite disappointing. As the game does consist of a considerable amount of levels (fortunately), being interupted by dinner in the middle of the game is quite annoying indeed. Argh!

That said, the game is luckily more in the skirmish and multiplayer modes. You can of course play No Escape as in singleplayer, were money is what counts. You can also play regular deathmatch (called knockout), tag and countdown. Several team play modes called team no escape, team knockout and capture the flag is also available. Quite a respectable selection. But does that help? Hmm...

Let's talk about some of the goods first. The introduction movies are great fun. I mean really great. I had a blast watching them - kudos to Funcom for that. The in-game graphics is quite good as well. Hey, it's not up to Quake 3 or Giants standard, but it's more than good enough. The character animations are quite respectable as well, but the size of the characters is unfortunately way to small (heck, I couldn't wait...). So unless you are pretty close up to a enemy, hitting him (and spotting him, for that matter) is way harder than it should be.

With a big chunk of levels to choose among, you won't go tired of them very soon. However, they aren't very different, and the idea of making the levels act like planets didn't really play out the way it should. Your view is dramaticly decreased as the planet starts to "bend" not very far in front of you. Another thing which makes this game hard to play is its strange control system. Instead of having the crosshair fixed in the middle of the screen as in regular FPS-games, you actually control the crosshair in the vertical direction. This made it a very strange and tiresome process to learn how to play the game.

Moving on, the HUD is quite annoying. Packing a lot of information - too much information many may say - it occupies way too much of the screen. The crosshair, which by the way has a different shape with each weapon, is larger than neccessary. This applies for the rest of the HUD too - its just too large.

Finally, lets talk about what the game is really about - multiplayer. I have to admit it, after having learned the wacky control system and got past the annoyance of the large HUD, I had a blast kicking my friends' ass at a LAN. The 7 game modes really were useful. On the internet, however, the table turned. Even after patch #3, the game still suffers from lag and very few online games. I was really lucky to once in a while find a game online, and when I did, playing wasn't that pleasent an experience hence the lag I mentioned.

"Darn, haven't patch #3 solved the problem?" I hear you ask. Well, somewhat. It has certainly improved on things a lot, but not quite enough to make me fully recomment No Escape. It is indeed quite fun on a LAN from time to time, with the different game modes, wacky weapons and some quite fun levels. So if LAN is only what you have in mind, go ahead - check the game out. But in my opinion, that just isn't quite enough. There's just too many small flaws. So sorry guys, great cinematics just doesn't cut it.

	+   Great cinematics +   Fun weapons & characters +   Can be quite amusing on a LAN		-   No save game option -   Dumb computer bots -   Limited field of view & large HUD -   Difficult control system -   Some lag on the internet, and very few games availible

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