Nightmare Creatures II

From Hell�s Heart, I Stab At Thee...And Kick At Thee...And Shoot At Thee...

In this unrepentantly bloody horror/action tweakfest, it's your job to prowl the spooky nighttime streets, alleys and catacombs of 1930s Europe, hunting down maniacal, murdering occultist Adam Crowley---but before you find him, you'll have to personally chop, skewer and dismember and disembowel an awful lot of monsters, freaks and abominations populating London, Paris and Prague, every one of them a member of the Crowley Fan Club. Speaking of freaks, you're no Rose Pageant winner yourself----you're Herbert Wallace, disfigured former prisoner and test-subject of Crowley, and your pale, gaunt ass looks like something out of a Marilyn Manson video. With the exception of its basic storyline---a vengeful monster-buster hunting down Crowley's minions on the way to the man himself---you can now forget much of what you may "know" about the Nightmare Creatures franchise; gone are the oft-cruddy camerawork, inane drowning deaths, enamel-chipping load times and plodding slug-outs. Nightmare Creatures II is more playable, scary and stylish, having addressed a number of irritated comments from players of the original incarnation: You can swim now, and put up a fight while doing it; those irritating load times have been "axed" to leave; the adrenaline meter has been exsanguinated...and I don't know what the world/creature designers have been taking lately, but I don't ever want any slipped into my drink, especially if I'm someplace dark.

Scripted Message On A Tattered, Victorian Boot: "Your Ass Here�

It's a hundred years later, and your single-handed supernatural monster-hunting mission has expanded to a kind of EuroTour wherein you'll hunt abominations in London, Paris and Prague on your quest to find and punish Crowley. However unpleasant your onscreen persona is to look at after his subjugation to Crowley, he fits right into NCII's bloody, tweaky, creaky world, now "updated" to a 1930s bleakscape---the Kalisto designers have gone to great lengths to resurrect (as it were) the spooky, atmospheric environs of the first game, making them more disturbing and more detailed in the process. In one level, I made my way through a decrepit sanitarium, its walls blighted with mold, its rooms filled with empty, bloody beds, its shattered windows cloaked in tattered curtains that billowed with the breeze into corridors, like ghosts. Somewhere a clock struck the hour in warped, off-key tones that sounded like Evil made audible. NCII uses a fluid gameplay-to-cinematic scheme that seamlessly moves the story events along and just as seamlessy reverts to the player. Submitted for your approval, a battle with one of the most messed-up things I've thus far seen on a PlayStation, a fishbelly-white, impossibly-thin maniac wielding a gas-powered chainsaw---it loped and tottered and crab-walked on its impossibly-thin legs (even the movement looked wrong) and came down a staircase after me....and when the violence began in the center of the room, blood flew to the very tops of the walls. While we're on the subject of onscreen gore...let's just get right back off it again; here, it's beyond pointless. I don't care if you're David "use my head for a seashell" Grossman, you can't even hold a serious conversation about "violence" in the context of Nightmare Creatures 2 without the game itself---and here I mean the very inanimate disc it comes on---sniggering and making you look like a complete asshole. The splattering, ceiling-staining, ropy, gouting gore here is so obviously stylized and over-the-top it defies remonstration. You can even toggle it to black or to nonexistence if you want, but don't trouble yourself: Just sit back, enjoy, and try not to get anything wet in your eye.

Once hand-to-hand (or whatever) combat begins in NCII, the interface and control scheme switches to a battle-mode which shows the health bars of each combatant (no more of that game-rushing adrenaline meter stuff from the first game) and automatically orients you toward whichever of your multiple attackers you happen to be facing. In addition to punches, kicks and sweeps, there are combo moves here, plus some nigh-unspeakable finish-moves for both your character as well as the enemies which are sure to put any chances of a "T" shelf-rating right in the toilet. Little touches go a long way, and NCII's got those, too---Wallace doesn't so much open doors as kick his way through them, and a number of different animations (showing doors whamming and shuddering open and/or flying clean off their frames) gives a dramatic sense of variety as well as Wallace's single-minded mission of vengeance: This guy doesn't care any more, and wants only Crowley's head on a stick. There are a lot of these little ambient touches, and if I have an immediate complaint, it's this: That such touches are so cool when you find them, that it's a little disheartening when you don't; the world is not consistently interactive, and kicking a hospital bed from one side may cause it to shudder and roll away, while doing the exact same thing from the other side may accomplish nothing. The grim game isn't without its moments of humor, either---consider a towering, blade-clawed monstrosity advancing on Wallace, making weird, threatening mystic passes...at which point Wallace offhandedly draws a pistol and unceremoniously guns the damned thing down, like Indiana Jones having enough of a scimitar-wielding greaseball (later in the game, you'll even have the opportunity to play as a twin-blade female warrior ---she helped Herbert in his pre-sequel trials and tribs---who's even more of a death-dealer, and much easier on the eyes). One major improvement is the camera---that which so often frustrated players in the first game, getting confused and leaving gamers open to attack---which smoothly follows around corners and intelligently dips to track your character when he enters a tunnel or corridor. Top the whole pleasingly gothic mess off with a spook-rock soundtrack by Rob Zombie, and you've got a punch-throwing, spell-casting, Europe-hopping odyssey in the making. Games like Nightmare Creatures 2---well, not games like Nightmare Creatures 2, but games that advance this successfully from their beginnings---are what sequels are meant to do, and be; improve upon the original without futzing with the formula too much.

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