I've owned several Mech combat games in the past year. Mech Assault is a good solid game but better suited for multiplayer and online play. Then there was the dismal Gun Metal. I thought of the two, Gun Metal was the worst. To be fair, it had nice graphics and a rarity-an Xbox game where you could use your own soundtracks. But Gun Metal suffered from no depth, predictable enemies, no replay value or much of anything else. Well, a new contender has arrived for the worst Mech game--Murakumo.
As Gertrude Stein once said about Oakland, "There's no there, there." The same is true for Murakumo. It makes Gun Metal look good.
Ubi Soft has an excellent reputation with its line of Tom Clancy games. Splinter Cell is a graphics tour de force. Sure, it can be difficult at times to play but it is still an outstanding game. What they were thinking when releasing such an awful game like this a mystery. Murakumo looks like a first year release game. Remember those days? All kinds of forgettable junk came out for the Xbox then and it was a long stretch between Halo and Splinter Cell. We are into the "Next Generation" games now. Is anybody at Ubi Soft listening?
The Game
So basically, Murakumo is a combat flight mech game. You'll be flying at breakneck speed around all kinds of landscapes and basically shooting at all things moving. The byline is "Renegade Mech Pursuit." Which means the good mechs have for some reason, gone bad and it's your job to search and destroy. You have one renegade mech and a host of smaller ones to shoot at. Your deadline is bad mech hitting a target or just getting away so you have to shoot it down before those events happen. So much for the plot.
The controls are A button fire main weapon and B button fire secondary weapon. The right and left triggers control acceleration and deceleration, respectfully. Left and right thumbsticks control movement. The Y button toggles the view. And that's it unless you include the Start button that lets you bail out of this mess.
The back of the box states that you can "Rip targets to shreds with plasma swards, beam rifles, sniper cannons and bazookas…" But even with that arsenal at your disposal is often not enough firepower to bring down a renegade mech. You shoot and shoot to only see a damage bar appear that shows about 25% damage. That's one of the most frustrating parts of playing the game. What does it take to shoot one of these darn things down? It's further hampered by all the smaller mechs flirting about-they cause your target reticle to lock on to them and off your main target causing stray missiles to hit them instead. It would have been nice to paint the target and lock on it just it. It's too bad the difficulty level for the early mission based part of the game couldn't have started out easy and then slowly ramped up but this a common failing of games.
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Then there is the problem with the renegade mech itself. It flies the same exact pattern every time you play a mission. All the player has to do is track and remember it's movements and you can cut it off and knock it down in time. In other words there is no AI to speak of in this part of the game. These are supposed to be advanced machines in the future and they can't deviate from a flight path?
A simple random flight path would have been better than this. This is an unconscionable error on the developers' part.
Multiplayer or Xbox Live support? Nope. This might have helped and given Murakumo some depth but it's not to be found here.
The Graphics
The graphics really are not bad but not what the Xbox is capable of producing. The first mission has you flying about a city loaded with skyscrapers. The buildings look nice but the streets are empty of vehicular or pedestrian traffic. What, everybody left town? When flying over the surrounding ocean it's flat and devoid of waves or any other realistic water textures.
The mechs to do look nicely modeled although there is not much in the way of textures on them, with most having a single flat color finish. The heads up display (HUD) is quite flashy but suffers from being too big and taking over most of the screen space. It can't be modified in any way like you can change the look of the HUD in Metroid Prime. Overall the graphics aren't bad-they just don't have anything we haven't seen before.
The cut scenes look terrific-the graphics here look much better looking the actual game does. They are however a bit blurry and that ruins the presentation of them.
One redeeming value is the frame rate. It remains consistent throughout the game and I noticed no slowdowns, even with lots of stuff flying about.
Sound
Scratchy guitar up-tempo guitar riffs and other vague melodies. Oh if I could only use my own music tracks, which so few Xbox game developers let us do. The sound effects of shots and explosions are acceptable. The voice acting is dreadful to put it nicely. At least you can change the volume for the music, sounds and voice effects from the main menu.
Overall
This game just doesn't have it--in any department. People shelling out $50 deserve better than this. Even folks renting it do. So buy it or rent it at your own risk. You've been warned!
This one is 1/5.
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