Satire is probably my favorite kind of humor. That is exactly what I expected from "Planet Alcatraz": exaggeration, allusions, and biting mockery of society and ideology. The game has all of that, but my biggest disappointment was not the gameplay with all its broken mechanics. It was how often its satire sinks into cheap shock humor. But first, the game itself.
It is a fairly linear isometric RPG with real-time combat and tactical pause. The stats, skills and progression are fairly average in my opinion, but there are quite a few tactical options. You can move and shoot while prone, crouching or standing, walk or run, and all of this affects range and accuracy. There is stealth, surprise attacks, sight and hearing, so enemies are revealed as you explore. The weapon selection is broad enough, ranging from melee and thrown weapons to grenades and several classes of firearms.
The skill system is often bloated and at times almost unfair to the player. For example, investing in "Imperial Weapons" is nearly pointless: those weapons only become available near the end of the game, while their ammunition is unique and impossible to replenish. The game also gives you no warning that ordinary shotguns will start performing poorly against armored enemies around the middle of the campaign. There are too many non-combat skills as well, although some of them are amusing. You can, for example, not only pickpocket an NPC but literally rob them and force them to hand over their inventory under threat of violence.
Your squad eventually grows to four characters, and this is where the most irritating mechanic shows itself: friendly fire. When enemies accidentally shoot each other and then start fighting among themselves, almost like in Doom, it is funny. Inside your own squad, the same mechanic becomes a nightmare. You can set each character's preferred attack range and combat behavior, but that is nowhere near enough control.
In aggressive mode, squad members choose targets and reposition themselves on their own, with absolutely no concern for allies standing in the line of fire. A character can dump a burst of armor-piercing rounds into a teammate's back because a tiny rat happened to run behind him. If you keep everyone in a more passive mode, you have to position the squad manually before every serious fight. There are no formations, and some locations do not even give you enough room to spread out properly. This is not "hardcore anti-casual design." It is simply bad design: the player is not given enough tools to control the fight, while the AI is too stupid to compensate for that lack of control.
With line of fire being this important, you would expect some kind of cover system. There is none, and the environment is not destructible either. The final battle pushes the problem into absurdity: your squad is trapped in a tiny area while enemies attack in large numbers from several directions. The difficulty does not come from an interesting tactical problem. It comes from being shoved into a corner while using a control system that was never built for this kind of encounter.
Even more irritating are mechanics that simply do not work properly. Pathfinding is awful: an NPC standing in a doorway can block it completely, squad members get stuck behind each other, and sometimes the game plots a route straight through a locked door that the character cannot even open.
Corpses are another problem. They pile on top of each other, so looting the bodies underneath turns into pixel hunting, and sometimes there is no clickable point left at all, making a corpse completely inaccessible. This combines especially badly with one of the more effective tactics: waiting around a corner and shooting enemies as they rush through a doorway. After the fight, you are left with a heap of bodies in the entrance.
Some enemies also have unusual body models. Once they are dead, certain pieces of clothing cannot be removed from them. Blow up the corpse, however, and its inventory drops onto the ground, at which point the supposedly impossible-to-remove clothing can suddenly be picked up.
Doors produce another bizarre bug: an enemy standing in a doorway or immediately behind it can sometimes be impossible to attack, while having no trouble shooting you from the same position.
The story is unusual more because of the combination of its ingredients than because any one of them is especially original, and the writers' worldview shows through quite clearly. The two major powers are the Empire and the Fourth Reich. Structurally, they are remarkably similar: rigid dictatorships built around militarism and racial hierarchy. The difference is mainly one of degree. The Empire treats non-white races as inferior; the Reich simply exterminates them. The protagonists are troopers infiltrating an Imperial prison planet while posing as inmates. They respect soldiers above all, treat civilians as inferiors, and see prisoners as garbage.
The Empire itself is a state in which the individual means practically nothing. Prisoners are sterilized and dumped onto a planet where racial segregation, slavery, drugs and violence are normal. During the game you meet people who clearly did not deserve to end up there, including kidnapped women forced into prostitution by criminals, but the system simply does not care. There is an enormous amount of material here for satire about militarism, xenophobia and the absolute supremacy of the state over the individual.
I am not much of a moralist, and I have no problem with harsh, dirty or offensive humor. The problem is that satire does not work merely because someone violated a social taboo. In "Starship Troopers", for example, militarism and xenophobia are mocked through the very form of the work. Here I often cannot tell where the writers are mocking their characters' worldview and where they are simply reproducing it. At times I genuinely suspect that some things I would like to read as satire are actually closer to the authors' own message.
That impression comes largely from how much of the humor relies on taboo-breaking itself. Racism, Nazism, fascism, sexism, cannibalism - there is almost every kind of ugliness you can think of. Its presence does not bother me. What bothers me is how crude the actual joke often is. There are genuinely hilarious conversations and some very good scenes, but a huge amount of the writing follows the same pattern: a character says something maximally rude, throws out an ethnic stereotype, or delivers another piece of filth, and the comedy is supposed to come from the fact that someone dared to say it at all. That feels more like trying to get a laugh through shock than actual satire.
As a result, potentially interesting ideas do not become sharper; they are simply drowned out by the constant barrage of ugliness. If a work wants to ridicule subjects like these, I want there to be an idea behind the provocation, not merely the pleasure of saying out loud what people normally do not say.
That is why the writing ultimately left a worse impression on me than the technical and design problems. Despite the stupid AI, broken pathfinding, friendly fire and numerous half-baked mechanics, I still found the game fairly interesting to play. But I came to it primarily for good satire, and instead found a work where interesting ideas are too often buried under crudeness for its own sake. That disappointment outweighed the game's strengths for me, so my overall verdict is negative.
