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It's Harroway - listen... It's too late to evacuate... I don't know if you're receiving this... communication is breaking up... We opened up... on your orders. It was a Pandora's box - all the evils of old Mars flew out. But Pandora found a solitary gift in the box - hope. I doubt there's any hope on cold Mars... people clumping together... time in the rock... should designate Mars a quarantine planet, but I know you won't. If you send a manned craft, warn the crew - stay alone, stay alive. And for... Martian Gothic:Unification is an action/adventure game similar in style to the Alone in the Dark series of games, utilising lush pre-rendered backgroundsand cinematic camera angles along with 3D models for the main characaters. However, this game takes the adventuring concept a little further, broadening the player's control to cover three individuals at the same time. The clue given in the initial broadcast means that the characters must stay apart, and they must each stay alive - having three characters does not mean you have three lives. Kill one, and it's Game Over baby, get two of them too close together and ... well, that'd be giving away part of the plot. Suffice it to say that get two of the characters too close together and you'll be loading a saved game.
Controlling the characaters is simplicity itself, with the arrow keys used for movement, F4 bringing up the inventory and F1 thru to F3 switching between the three characters themselves. You can switch between them at will, although you must always remember that when you are working with one of the characters, the other two are still vulnerable to attack by zombies or other creatures. Fortunately, when this happens a big red triangle with the character's name appears alerting you to the attack.
Interacting with the environment - in those places you're allowed to - is acheieved using the Enter key. When you are somewhere you can do something a little magnifying glass icon will appear in the top-right of the screen. Pressing Enter will bring up a menu of actions, such as opening a door or locker, or of using some world object with something in your inventory, or to search a zombie. In situations where you are opening a locker or searching a zombie, you will automatically switch to you inventory screen, with a list of the items available to you displayed on the left, with your inventory on the right.
You can move items between characaters using the vac tubes that are scattered around the base. Thankfully you don't need to give a destination, however you must always remember that no more than four items can be placed into the system at any one time.
Puzzles
Once you have familiarised yourself with the game controls and the way everything ties together, you can start working your way through the game. You will need to use all three characters to complete this game, as certain sections can only be accomplished by one individual character - for example, MOOD access (the main computer) can only be performed by Kenjo Uji, and similarly lab work can only be performed by Dianne Matlock.
Clues are liberally scattered throughout the base as to what needs to be accomplished. That said one or two of the puzzles can be very difficult to solve. On the whole the puzzles are fairly easy to figure out, although some do require vast amounts of tracking to and fro through the base. One puzzle even requries that two characters be in the same room at the same time - a hair raising experience as a mis-step will bring the characters too close together...
Graphics
The best way to describe this game visually is 'stunning'. Made up of pre-rendered scenes with the different characters placed on top as 3D models means that a vast amount of detail can be crammed into each scene. The models themselves are well done, if a little blocky in places, and there are only a limited number of different zombie skins. A lot of imagination has been put into the design of Vitae Base, with a number of distinctly different areas that you will need to explore.
The backgrounds give a good sense of the violence that swept through the base, and the trimorph model (the primary nasty) is suitably horrible, appearing to be constructed from three human forms.
Sounds
Great attempts have been made to add atmosphere using sounds effects and music, and when you first enter the base it is appropriately scary. Spot effects are also well done, such as one section where the characters walk through a pool of blood you hear the change in the footsteps. However, hearing the same 'scary' chord each time a zombie grabs you - which happens with disturbing regularity - quickly wears.
Background sound effects are well done though, and the addition of eerie voices rising throughout the duration of the game do add a lot to the feeling of the game. Each of the voice journals you encounter has also been recorded by an individual voice actor, as have the voices of the three primary characters.
Problems
Here is where the game lost it's appeal for me. The graphics are beautifully rendered, but you can too easily get hung up on some obscure clipping boundary, leading the character you are controlling to suddenly be running in place with no obvious impediment to their movement. The bounding boxes for your characaters seem to be huge as well, as attempting to run past a zombie will result almost invariably in your being caught and attacked. And often you'll find yourself magically transported across the corridor and turned around, leaving you to try escaping from the hold the zombie has on you and then trying and get past yet again - after turning around of course.
The cinematic camera angles also lead to numerous interesting occurences of shooting blindly off-screen in the vain hope of hitting a zombie, or being attacked from out of view by a zombie you didn't know was there.
I also lost track of the number of nice, hard iron bars and pipes I saw lying around - perfect for bashing zombies with. However they're all part of the background, and you cannot interact with them in any way. The same goes with just about everything in the game - even if you wanted to move something you can't - all interaction is strictly controlled.
You can kill zombies though - well, for a short period of time. Shoot them enough and they'll go down, but watch out as there's limited ammunition. And if you get grabbed whilst in combat mode, once you escape you'll have to switch back to combat mode if you have time. There's also a kick action in combat, but I'm yet to find a use for it. I thought I'd be able to kick the little floor crab thingies, but have not had much luck. Switching between normal and combat mode is simple - press the space bar - however the response to said keypresses can be lax at times, and if you're close to a wall or other boundary, once you throw the zombie off you'll have not quite enough time to draw your weapon before you get grabbed again.
The way the zombie interaction has been done is just plain annoying - it's not scary and it adds nothing to the game after the fifteenth time you push off the same zombie. Crossed with this, zombies can kill you. Coupled with the save game system - only available in limited numbers from computer terminals and non-reuseable - you must balance how much time you spend exploring with how many save games you use, and I have lost count of the number of times I have been died for one reason or another and have to replay 45 minutes of game just to get back to where I was previously.
Item interaction is another thing that could have been handled better. While you can search corpses to see if they're carrying anything, if you take something from a corpse you cannot return it, which strikes me as a little odd. Instead, you must deposit items either in the vac tubes or in lockers and hatches, which are sparsely dotted around the map. Many times I have been forced to troop through the base in search of a stash place just so I can get the next clue to a puzzle I already know the answer to - but must get the characters to hold the appropriate items before I can proceed - since I have solved it previously and died before I managed to find a spare save game slot.
Summary
Martian Gothic: Unification has a very strong storyline, some gorgeous visuals and an interesting twist on traditional action/adventure gameplay, but the whole package is seriously let down by the flaws inherent in the way the game has been implemented. Perhaps if it had been created with an engine similar to that used in System Shock 2 it might have been a much better game, especially if interaction between the players and the environment had been more than passive except for scripted or allowed sequences.
I really enjoyed this game when I first started playing it, however the more I played the more frustrated I became with the problems. I have not completed this game, despite playing it for more than three weeks solid. The past week has been mostly covereing the same ground over and over and over between the game freezing, crashing to the desktop or me accidentally killing one of the players.
Still, the idea is there, and it's very original.
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