Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

THE BAD:
Enemies are blobby pixellated shmoo-like creatures. Aggravating design makes it easy for enemies to kill you from afar, poor controls, no auto-aim.

SUMMARY:
This latest FPS for the GBA tries very hard to make a go of things. The design is as sophisticated in some ways as some recent full-size console shooters, and includes an interesting mix of weapons, varying mission goals, different vision modes such as sniper and infrared, and such diverse actions as swimming and dog simulator. (!) Crawfish is to be commended for aiming high here instead of porting over some musty old SNES game, as so many other alleged game designers have done recently for GBA.

However, aiming high is nice, but achiving those goals is another story. Control, graphics, and level design all combine to make this a frustrating and unplayable experience for most. First, you can only look left and right, strafe, and move forward and backward. To look up or down, you have to press "select" and then manuever the cursor with the dpad while your character is immobile. Unfortunately, the game design fails to take account of this awkwardness in control, and puts many enemies higher or lower than you. As you stop, hit select, and sloooowly move the wee cursor, the baddies keep on plugging away at you while you're immobile.

Vertical autoaim correction like in the first few Doom games would have solved this issue, leaving the fine cursor conrtrol for sniper mode, which would make more sense if you must be stationary when using it. However, Crawfish has not implemented this which means you will die a lot as you either toy with the cursor while being riddled, or do a one man human wave attack and run down stairs or up ladders to put yourself on the same level as your assailants, also while being shot repeatedly.

This puzzling move is combined with a general scarcity of ammo and health to make this a much harder than average shooter even before factoring in the painful control. The final nail in your coffin is that the enemies can see and shoot you from very far away. You unfortunately cannot do the same, as there are civilians scattered throughout the levels who are very hard to distinguish from the enemies at anything other than close range due to incredibly pixellated graphics. Even if you cold-bloodedly wanted to try to butcher everyone you see from a distance, the limited ammo prevents this approach. The player thus has the ignominous fate of being killed repeatedly by these little one dot pixels which represent distant enemies.

Anyway, this is obviously made to be a really tough FPS, but the toughness comes partly from intentional design but mainly from sloppy implementation of controls and gameplay. If you don't mind getting killed repeatedly solely due to graphic and control issues, you might find an innovative FPS game here. If you are at all non-masochistic, you should find another game to play. And designers, maybe we could declare the FPS genre officially deceased on the GBA? Between the two Ecks V Sever games and Duke Nukem Advance, it can be seen that this sort of game does not work smoothly on GBA. The Doom ports are OK (due mainly to the vertical auto aim feature) but who really wants to play Doom at this point in time? There are many other styles of games that work well on GBA, so let's expend development efforts on them rather than on "Unreal Tournament Advance" or other silliness. Square peg, round hole...