The post-Doom generation has been playing catch-up for the past two years. Most of the pretenders claim to out-Doom Doom but fail to live up to their bold pronouncement. For players not interested in multi-player (and who enjoyed completing two hour levels in one sitting), Dark Forces was an improvement in terms of 3D sophistication and, well, it was Star Wars and all. Heretic and Hexen added more atmosphere and variety. Descent added even more dimensionality (literally) to the 3D world (erm, would that make it 4D?). The only game that has truly taken an enormous leap forward has been Origin's System Shock
Origin's latest game, CyberMage: Darklight Awakening, is another of those first-person action-adventures that takes the basic Doom modus operandi and puts a (slightly) new spin on things. For the most part, it is more complex than many of its ilk, adding an adventuring "take item A to person B in order to receive information C" paradigm to the standard Doom inspired "press button D in order to open door E while killing everything in sight" mode of play. It's unfortunate that this game, and most first-person adventures for that matter, choose not to deviate from this standard formula more often.
It's also unfortunate, considering designer D.W. Bradley's pedigree (the ground-breaking Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant, among others), that there are no puzzles of any type. All doors operate with switches and, in most cases, inventory items are used when appropriate. There is an instance where you receive what appears to be a riddle about how to destroy the UPE (ultimate personification of evil), but it's at the very end of the game, and that final battle ends up just being another epic slug fest.
Gamers expecting another Wizardry from Mr. Bradley will be disappointed on a number of other levels. The entire narrative of the game, from dialogue to overall plot, is rather tepid. The plot is pure cyberpunk by-the-numbers, with big corporations ruling the world, a bad guy with weird powers attempting world domination, and you being the one guy who can defeat said UPE. The dialogue of the characters you bump into is consistently amateurish, with the voice characterizations running from merely mediocre to "why did they bother?" Some of the dialogue is apparently strung together from multiple samples, causing the results to sound artificial because no pauses were placed between samples. Special credit, though, must be given to the voice of Necrom, the UPE, who sounds so much like Darth Vader you'll be searching the credits for James Earl Jones.
The areas that the player will create havoc in are enormous (10 in all, with some requiring multiple visits) and distinctive, progressing from cities and buildings to caves and rivers. The cities feel fairly alive (as much as modern technology will allow), and all of the inhabitants, while lacking many frames of animation, are well drawn, though the repetition of characters reaches a surreal high-point when you enter a prison full of locked-up, but still heavily armed, soldiers. Come on guys, couldn't you come up with a soldier character without a weapon?
The graphics, while looking awe-inspiring in the high-resolution modes, are serious resource hogs. Performance is, at times, sluggish even in low-resolution on a low-end Pentium. This is especially evident on some of the more visually advanced levels that feature transparent walls û apparently, this causes a slowdown in the rendering of the scenery. Perhaps the reason the engine feels slow is because of its complexity û not only can you run, jump, fly and crouch, but you can also hop in tanks and an aircar to wreak even more havoc. There are innumerable cool things that you can bump into, such as video monitors that show news clips and true stereo sound (try rotating in a circle while talking to someone). All of these things conspire to slow the game down.
On one level, CyberMage is something of a disappointment û it's really just another supercharged Doom clone, closer in execution to Dark Forces than System Shock. This shouldn't lead you to expect that you won't thoroughly enjoy the game û the sheer amount of time that I spent on this incredibly challenging game is enough to tell me that, despite my criticisms, I was really enjoying it. It's one of those "Just one more level before I go to sleep" sort of games. Warts and all, CyberMage is without question a serious contender to the throne of top post-Doom blast-a-thon. It's too bad it settled just for that.
