GBA: Backtrack - one to avoid

Shinji · 07-10-2001 12:11pm #1

Slapped in a test cart of Backtrack on GBA last night for a bit of a play... I now suspect that this game has stolen a small piece of my humanity (such as it was).

This is the first FPS game on the GBA, and if it wasn't for the fact that I've already played Ecks Vs Sever and Doom on the system, I'd be tempted to give up on handheld FPS games forever - for the sake of the children!

Basically, what we have here is a Wolfenstein clone. Kind of. The levels are Wolf3D style, with no raised sections or anything, but for some utterly bizarre reason (and totally missing the point of how Wolf3D works) the guys writing it have created a six-degrees-of-freedom texture mapper to do the walls etc.

Er. This, for those of you who don't know 3D engine tech, is the most pointless thing ever. The game has all the BAD stuff that comes with texture mapping (badly) on a low power system, such as texture glitching and MASSIVE pop-up only a few feet away from your character - it's not even fogging, the walls just spring into existence when you get close enough. Needless to say it's bloody ugly. None of the GOOD stuff of texture mapping is in there though - you can't look up or down, there are no slopes... An astonishingly stupid tech decision, all in all.

Then again, the team responsible for this aren't going to win any prizes for genius in the first place. The enemies are astonishingly badly drawn, the weapons are crap... Remember Corridor 7? This is Corridor 7 without ANY of the redeeming features. It's that bad - in fact, it's one of the worst games I've ever played, and I don't say that lightly.

I strongly recommend that none of you buy this game, as if you do so, you're running a horrible risk of actually PLAYING it at some point. Which would be bad.