Curse: The Eye of Isis [PC/2003]
Curse was developed by Asylum Entertainment and released in 2003 for PC, PS2 and Xbox. You can
tell this was a passion project for them, considering almost allgames they made were licensed titles based on children brands. Curse is an old-school survival horror game (fixed camera, tank controls, combat stance, run button, etc.) set in London in the 1890s - more specifically, inside the British museum of natural history. An invaluable Egyptian artifact known as the Eye of Isis has been stolen by a notorious thief known as Le Chat. You fight your way through more thieves and lawbreakers, but soon enough the curse of Isis starts spreading and you get to fight 'zombies', mummies and even a couple of taxidermied bears. Unfortunately, enemies tend to get stuck on the environment and aren't much of a threat.
The game has you playing alternately as archeologist and museum curator Victoria Sutton and her 'childhood friend' Darien Dane. The game comes with a pretty decent firearms selection: revolver, rifle, flamethrower, crossbow and mortar. The crossbow can be loaded with standards darts, but also silver and explosive darts. Much like in
Carrier, the game features autoaim, but you can also choose to target specific body parts. This gimmick is pretty useless against regular enemies, but it's required and needs to be used smartly against bosses. The game even has some OK puzzles, even though they border on 'braindead easy'.
I thought the entire game was supposed to take place within the museum, but it turns out that's only about one third of the game. Later on you even board a ship and the final area of the game is an Egyptian pyramid. The character switcharoo is often sudden and you can actually lose weapons and a lot of consumables as a result, but the game is pretty generous with weapons/ammo/healing items, so it never gets as bad as
Code Veronica. The game is a bit of a letdown because of how uninteresting the story and characters are. Also, because of how low the overall challenge is due to the subpar AI. Still, the game follows the
RE formula pretty closely, it does have a decent combat/puzzle balance and delivers a solid survival horror adventure, which doesn't do anything new at all, but it features a different and fairly interesting setting. Ultimately, its faithfulness to the
RE formula does
Curse much more good than harm.
+ Good use of the aiming system against bosses; Decent combat/puzzle balance; Interesting setting.
- Poor AI; Boring story and characters.
3/5Pics:
Kabus 22 [PC/2006]
Kabus 22 (Kabus meaning
nightmare) is a
RE-inspired game from Turkey. It's, uh, very adherent to the formula since you don't have a reload button and you can't move at all when you're in 'combat stance' - you could actually do both in
Curse. Also, fixed camera, tank controls and all that good stuff.
The game's story and setting is pretty similar to
Half-Life 2, just replace the alien invaders with an evil religious cult that divided the world into 'zones'. The game's set within 'Zone 22' or - more specifically - Istanbul. The main character is Demir, a member of the 'resistance' - but you can tell by his uniform that he used to be a soldier in the Turkish army. Later, you get to play as his girlfriend, Ebru, as well as a guy named Inzar. You only play briefly as Ebru and her sections are more puzzle-oriented since her only weapon is a puny revolver. Inzar plays completely differently: except for some 'magic' powers, he fights entirely in melee with some sorts of blades attached to his arms - so when you use him, the game basically turns into
Onimusha.
Well, the best thing about this game - by far - is the setting. The game captures Istanbul pretty well and the locations have an exotic but authentic look to them. The worst thing about the game is the combat - combat system, enemies, boss fights, the whole shebang. The puzzles range from fine to kinda tedious, but they're overall OK. Playing as Demir (which is 80% of the game), you get your hands on most of the weapons in the game pretty early: an absolutely useless handgun, a shotgun, a machine gun, etc. You actually obtain way too many weapons all at once and some of them just feel redundant. None of them feel like they pack a punch and you never see enemies losing limbs or anything like that - just a splash of blood. And you know, if
RE1 could do that in 1996, then maybe I should expect something like that from a RE-inspired game coming out a decade later? Anyway, weapons even include mines and grenades, which are excellent if you're trying to kill yourself with the splash damage.
Unfortunately, enemies are absolutely awful. Some of the earliest enemies you come across are zombies that can
teleport in front of you, so running away from them doesn't work very well. What's worse, it's that when you receive damage, your character turns in the direction that attack came from, so that if you were trying to run away from an enemy, now your character is facing the wrong way and you're likely to get attacked again and get stunlocked in melee by the enemy. The enemies are absolutely adept at stunlocking you in melee by the way. Other low points include a turret section against stupidly annoying flying enemies: let me tell you, turret sections and old school survival horror games blend about as well as orange juice and freaking cereals.
The story concept is fairly interesting, but it's not particularly original and, most importantly, the characters are vastly uninteresting. It doesn't help that the Turkish voice acting is pretty bad and the voices' volume is too low. Then again, I'm pretty sure it's the devs providing the voices. I heard the Polish version actually has decent voice acting, but I wouldn't know. The game was also translated in English by the way, so no worries if you were actually thinking about playing this gem.
Sarcasm aside, the graphics are pretty weak, but the environments are faithful to some actual Istanbul locations and they add a
lot to the atmosphere. I particularly mean the areas that were clearly inspired by
Hagia Sophia and the
Basilica Cistern - great stuff. Unfortunately, the game itself, huh, not so great.
+ Decent atmosphere; Exotic and unique setting.
- Awful stunlocking enemies; Wack weapons; Uninteresting characters; Turret section; Such uniqueness, but then one of the boss fights is the Balrog??
2/5Pics: