Oh, hey yet another game that just isn't available on the Steam store anymore for some reason. Oh well.
Anyway, I may as well leave a review...
I played through the first episode of three, which took about an hour, I got the gist of it. I did enjoy what I played though. Honestly I had never really heard of Bio Menace before, but I found it in my Steam Library, so I must have bought it at some point, and it's kind of neat.
It's a side-scrolling action game. I'm not really sure what to liken it to, but it feels a lot like a Duke Nukem game - except here your guy is named Snake Logan, which I guess is... a combination of Kurt Russell's character from Escape from New York, and, Wolverine? I don't know. There's no adamantium claws or melee weapons even in this game, so who knows.
The controls are like really simple, intuitive, the game scrolls really nicely and plays pretty well for a game of this era, I think. You get SHOOT which is control, and then JUMP which is left alt. And then you can move with the arrow keys and throw grenades with, either shoot + up, or just the ENTER key. Sounds a little weird but it's really not that bad.
I was in a somewhat cautious mood upon looking at the difficulty selection, so I opted to play on easy. I beat the episode without game overing once, but that was only because I found a secret level that gave me like 7 extra lives. One level in particular, called Elevator or Elevators, is just nothing but a series of platforms that go up and down, and if you fall you instantly die and lose a life. It's also the only level where I had trouble actually with platforms being finicky too, so I ended up losing like 3 lives in as many seconds at one point just because I'd go to hop to a ledge and then fall through it or slip off it somehow.
The enemy AI can be kinda rude at times, since certain enemies will camp ladders, but I only noticed that being a problem in the first level. Other than that, they have pretty set patterns which I think is a good thing overall since it lets you come up with strategies to fight them, and since they aren't overly complex, they're not too challenging or frustrating to deal with. I am okay with this. It reminds me of Doom, and the guy who designed this game, Jim Norwood, I think he did a good job basically coming up with a few different types of enemies to throw at you in each level, so there's even some decent enemy variety.
Overall though, despite all of this, the game is not too challenging - except for the fact that you do kind of have to just take hits sometimes. There are many parts of later levels where you kind of just have to take a hit, and while some sections are very generous with medkits, there are some that are pretty stingy.
The door and key system is an interesting one. So basically every level has so many doors that you can walk up to and unlock with keys. Keys are just all over the place, usually just floating in the air 'around' almost strewn haphazardly. Every door pretty much has points in it, except for a couple that have items you need to progress. This probably should be something I dislike, but I had absolutely no problems because I pretty much always had enough keys to open doors.
I was really happy with the level layouts in this game. I don't know if it's the best level design I've ever seen, really, it's not THAT great, but everything is very orthodox and makes sense - you go down a side route, you get rewarded. There's a long route to the end, it has a key in one of the last doors at the end so you can go back and use the key to progress or exit the level. You see the objective (rescue the hostage, one per stage) at the beginning of the level, you thus have to explore until you find the key to rescue them, and then you can leave. It's all pretty classic stuff, and I was very happy with that.
I also liked to see the 'secret levels' thing. The game has absolutely no problem with just giving you access to secret levels that give you truckloads of points and tons of extra lives and stuff, they really do feel like rewards and even though you probably really don't care about points or whatever, extra lives are definitely nice to have. I like seeing developers kinda splurge on players in this way, because it's fun.
Speaking of, let's talk about weapons. So you start off with what I will just call the peashooter, since it's clearly that type of starter gun where you can hammer the shoot button to shoot, it doesn't have autofire and it does paltry damage, but it has infinite ammo so you can plink away at enemies all you want. Then there's the machine gun I guess, which gives you autofire and about 100 bullets. Then there's the plasma gun, which has 20 shots and does big damage and interestingly can destroy a couple annoying enemies bullets can't. And finally, in the last couple levels you can find the 'super gun' that has like 90 bullets I think, but does apparently 5 times the normal shot damage.
Then there's grenades, flame grenades(?) and then landmines which I personally don't usually like, but they turned out to be okay in this game, for the most part it seemed like they only give you the mines when you are fighting enemies you would want to kill with mines, and you get the other grenades whenever it would make sense. Not a giant plethora of weapons, but it's enough, and they are all useful whenever you find them.
It really felt to me that there was a lot in common with Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem 3D in this game... your guy's plane got shot down, Snake is fighting weird alien-looking creatures, just like Duke Nukem, I don't know if they are literally aliens but they sure look like it, there's button combinations you have to press in order to open doors, usually secret doors that give you big loot, the final boss even says "it's down to you and me" which, Duke Nukem himself literally says at the conclusion of DN3D, to the Cycloid Emperor. There's also the sewers, which Duke Nukem has a glut of, and the keycards, and you're playing a kind of tough action man type of guy.
Anyway, I was surprised that I quite enjoyed Bio Menace. Aside from the Elevators level, it was pretty decent. Certainly not the BEST game I've ever played, really, but it was an alright kinda game. I really liked how smooth it felt to control, shooting felt good, and all the power-ups and weapons you can find were fun to use.
