Psi Project: Legacy

ИГРАТЬ МНЕ НИКОГДА НЕ НАДОЕДАЕТ И УЖ ТОЧНО НИКОГДА НЕ НАДОЕСТ...ЧТО ДЕЛАТЬ В ЭТОЙ ЖИЗНИ БЕЗ ВИДЕОИГР!?

Oh dear. THAT engine again. When will I learn? After the bland disappointment of Psi Project 2 (now discontinued, it seems), I really hoped the third game would be better, something closer to or better than the first. I thought the original Psi Project a surprisingly decent and sometimes creative horror game and resolved to give this a fair shot. White it has a couple of moments and isn't horrible or broken, I can't say it's good. Psi Project: Legacy was made with Raycasting Game Maker, a simple to use but terribly constricting program that lets you create Wolfenstein 3D-style FPS games. Most of the games made with it feel the same. Enemies move in the same patterns, are always facing you, and have the most basic AI. Gameplay boils down to running and shooting. Working  within these confines, the developer does a halfway decent job. There are a couple of moderately effective horror moments, with you running through darkness as voices mumble and enemy figures loom as you sprint past them, only to have the developer subvert your perception when what you took for an expanse of darkness turns out to be a black wall. In the later levels, the developer exploits the engine's shortcomings, combined with powerful enemies, to evoke a bit of tension and fear (similar to the Jaguar "Aliens Vs. Predator" or, more to the point, the Raycasting Game Maker game "Warlock's Revenge"). The graphics are a bit better in this game (albeit nothing astounding). Other than that, the game doesn't have much to offer. There are only a couple of types of enemies and a lot of repetition of the same horror sfx and pixelated bloody graphics. The game is short, too. There are a handful of levels, only a couple of substantial length. In the fifth level, you get all the guns in the game and plenty of ammo. Then you open a door just like any other--and the game takes you back to the main menu. The end. There's hardly the barest hint of the story that the store page talks about. It really feels like the developer got lazy after making just a few levels and said, "that's enough." It's kind of fun to play through once, but you'll be lucky to get more than half an hour of gameplay out of it, and it doesn't add enough to what the first Psi Project brought to the table. Not a good enough title to recommend for a dollar, and certainly not for five.