Happy Halloween, Gamer heads!! This is our final review in the MONTH OF VIRTUA SPOOooOooOOooOOOOKIES! Get ready for some real horror! And I do mean horror because this game is horrible! So, just sit back, relax, and at least act scared.
It is no secret that Full Motion Video is the smooch of death for 99% of games "graced" with its presence. Myst still has a fanbase, but anyone will tell you that the acting in the game's FMV segments are so terrible they're great. The bad acting is infamous in these terrible parts of games. Developers normally just stepped in and did the acting themselves to nightmarish effect. Then you've got games that actually got Z-List movie actors in their games. Yeah, that's what Corpse Killer did. You would think this would improve the acting to some degree, but you would be very, very wrong. In fact, to some degree, it's somehow even worse.
Among this cast of actors, they got the late Vincent Shiavelli, who actually has quite the long filmography, although most of it is about as low grade as you would expect. He is seen through a lot of this game and his scenes are a master class of bad. He fits right in with the rest of these performers and WOW there is a lot to unpack here. These cut scenes are very hard to watch. You will cringe your face into another dimension and you won't need Vegeta to do it (if you get that reference, you're officially in the cool club). It's obvious that these are all first takes unless something catastrophic occurred. The game developers should have worked a few more takes into the budget, because even the ZOMBIES are over acting here.
That's just the FMV cut scenes! Believe it or not, all of it is technically full motion video! The characters in the gameplay scenes are still real people, they are simply cut outs that are slapped onto the background. They run toward you in a VERY unconvincing way while you shoot the screen with an ever shooting machine gun. You shoot the cheap looking zombies and they make stock screaming noises in an ever revolving loop.
The zombies are just people in cheap makeup. Some of them just have regular clothes on and some of them look so cheap, the devs may as well have just reached through the screen and slapped you to kill your immersion. This is beyond awful!
The game is also ridiculously easy almost 90% through it. Then the difficulty spikes to levels beyond reckoning. Lulling you into a coma only to inject this level of suck is a bit of a jerk move. Seriously, you would be hard pressed to stay conscious amid the constant gunfire, weird screams and terrible cutscenes. There are different types of ammo, explosives and a couple of other things to try and spice things up. Guess how well it works. Go on, guess...
Anyway, this is one of the worst games on the Sega Saturn or any of the other systems it was on upon its original release. There's a label on the Graveyard Edition that says it's one of the top 20 games of the year. This is a blatant lie and I'd be surprised if they didn't get sued for false advertising. You may notice this game was on both of my top worst Saturn games lists. It's pretty obvious why FMV's didn't really stand the test of time and after the fifth generation of games, they became more and more scarce. Thank GOD! If you really want to play this game out of morbid curiosity, it is available on Steam at the time of this article's writing. By all means, it's Halloween and the terrible nature of this game is quite scary. Have a ball and make it spooooooooky!
