Demons are flooding into Manhattan through a portal that leads directly in from hell. What can you do to stop the fiendish flow? And should you bother?
Describing Dennis Hopper as Mr Beautiful may be pushing the extremes of the imagination somewhat, but that’s what Hell is all about. It’s set 100 years from now, and the New York that many people know, and some love, is not as it should be...
The city has developed a direct dimensional port to the fiery depths of hell, which is oozing denizens of various nefarious persuasions into America’s largest urban area. These beasts are dragging the innocent (and the less so – they’re not choosy) into the void.
You play one of two Artificial Reality Containment officers – sort of freelance police employed by the government to ensure people are not getting up to no good with high technology. There’s corruption within the government, however, and someone has set you up. You have to point and click your way through the best part of New York, trying to work out why someone’s decided to have you assassinated, who’s behind it all, and what, exactly, the link is between your government and the demonic portal.
Hell is an adventure game, largely conversation based. During these little talks you attempt to extract clues and hints from contacts, friends, fellow agents and adversaries throughout the city. You must also collect items from key locations to help you combat the increasing number of demons making excursions into your realm, and solve any puzzles you encounter.
The rendered graphics are exemplary. When you speak to another character, small windows appear, which show you or your opposite in high-resolution animated detail, and the various location backdrops are suitably dark and austere. The characters look like real people rather than animated sprites, because real people’s faces have been used as models for the characters in the game.
Which brings us back, via a somewhat convoluted path, to Dennis Hopper, who stars in this fantastical outing, along with numerous other famous faces. Hopper speaks the words of one of the antagonists – Mr Beautiful – and there’s also a rendered 3D model of his head, plonked on top of the character he plays, complete with texture-mapped features. It looks more or less like the man himself, but with horns. Avid media spotters may also identify the voice of Solene Solux, the President, as belonging to Grace Jones.
The impressive graphics Hell boasts are all well and good, but there is a price to pay. The movement of the characters through their environments is slow and awkward, as is the control system, which crawls at best. It’s a case of too much graphical detail being handled by a slow programming system, and the situation doesn’t improve even when you run the game on high-performance Mac systems.
Meanwhile, the voices of the rich and famous fail to give the dreadful script any credence. The writers were obviously so desperate to give the game a cyberpunk slant that they have fallen into the barbed wire trap of cliché after painful cliché. Phrases like ‘I’ll surf the underground net and see what I can dig up’ abound with a frequency that betrays a complete lack of imagination on the part of the writers.
Hell is a case of an involving plot that’s let down by a lumbering control system, inadequate scripting and over-indulgence in the graphical department (which helps it to look polished, but ultimately hampers the game’s playability). It would have been a cracker, had the coding been up to handling the amount of graphics in here, and had the script been fresher, but as it stands, Hell splashes A-grade special effects throughout a B-movie quality game. Paul Pettengale
It’s a hard life ‘scrubbing’ out agents who work for you, but hey, some aged colonel’s got to do it.
You don’t want to go here. Well, you have to, or you won’t get very far though the adventure, but that doesn’t make it a particularly nice place to go.
The tube map for New York is every bit as confusing as our own for London, only it’s 3D.
Why lead characters stand to attention when inactive is beyond us. Still, your friend Dante seems to be quite relaxed. Size 8, look.
Your character. Unless you decide to play the female lead instead of the male, that is.
Price: £40. Out: now.
Requires: LCII or higher, 8Mb of RAM, System 7 or later, 13-inch, 256-colour monitor, CD-ROM drive.
Contact: Gametek on 01753 553445.
Graphics 88%
Fantastic rendered visuals are fine, but they slow everything way down.
Sound 70%
Features the voices of famous actors but, sadly, no music.
Gameplay 55%
Involving plot, but it’s let down by a clumsy interface and a dreadful script.
