Illbleed (Dreamcast) (2001)
Developer: Crazy Games

Review by Faididi and Co.

What a bloody mess

Story: Average

Eriko is the leader of her school's horror film club, but all the other members have run off ahead of her to a new theme park called Virtual Horror Land. One can hardly blame them, because the venue's enigmatic owner will award a huge cash prize to anyone who survives all of the attractions, never mind the stupid legal issues or the basic business sense in having a theme park that literally kills customers. The story is the stuff of B-movie junk and probably lots of drugs. It's memorable for its weirdness but not for any real plot, although it has multiple endings.

Gameplay: Below Average

Created by Crazy Games (formerly known as Climax Graphics), Illbleed is a strange 3D action game that has very little in common with the same developer's earlier adventure, Blue Stinger. Instead of featuring a pair of heroes who fight enemies together while freely exploring a facility, it lets you play as only one character at a time in 6 lengthy but linear stages, each representing an attraction at Virtual Horror Land. The so-called hub is little more than a rest point that allows you to change heroes in between the stages, which are seldom maze-like, contain few puzzles, and require almost zero backtracking.

The action here is unlike that of other games, because the hazards in Illbleed come mostly in the form of traps that can injure or shock the heroes, who get wasted either by running out of stamina or by letting their heart rate shoot up too high. These traps are placed almost randomly, but the heroes have the ability to scan their surroundings and use a limited number of protection "tags" to negate the effects of any traps.

Curiously, the actual monsters appear solely in a small subset of the traps and in special areas (including the boss scenes). The game switches to a battle mode for these encounters, where your character normally needs to defeat all the enemies in a small, simple arena or successfully call for escape at a certain spot. The enemies draw inspiration from across the entire horror genre, including gun-toting zombies, haunted dolls, mutants armed with flamethrowers, and even a building-sized ogre.

The biggest highlight of Illbleed, however, is its unusual level design. The stages truly differ from one another, not merely in visual theme but in the nature of their obstacles and challenges. In one stage, the goal is to reach an exit while fleeing from ax-wielding maniacs. In another stage, the goal is to avoid gigantic worms that can burrow through the ground to sneak up on their prey, Tremors-style. In yet another stage, your character tries to identify a serial killer in a bizarre twist on the classic who-did-it setup. The material that Illbleed spoofs isn't strictly limited to B-movies, either. Illustrating this is the highly disturbing stage that parodies popular works varying from Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog to Pixar's Toy Story.

Unfortunately, this same craziness also leaves the game grossly unfocused. The battle mode gives Illbleed the disjointed combat flow of an RPG, without any good story for compensation. As interesting as the heart rate gimmick seems at first, it becomes a literal waste of time by forcing the heroes to repeatedly wait and calm themselves before proceeding again. That the heroes can find only one hand-to-hand weapon and one ranged weapon in each stage is bad enough, and they never even get to wield chainsaws, but they inexplicably discard all of their weapons and stamina-restoring supplies at the end of every stage, and that is fucking retarded.

The multiple heroes are a joke, too. Although there are 5 playable characters, they differ only in terms of their stamina capacity and their shock tolerance, which decides how fast their heart rates rise. The game always begins with Eriko, her friends not becoming available until they're rescued. Due to the stages' predetermined order, some of the heroes are effectively restricted to the later portions of Illbleed. Furthermore, the heroes' stats can be gradually increased, which means there's no good reason to play as anyone besides Eriko, who already possesses the highest initial rating in the most important attribute (shock tolerance), not to mention also looking the sluttiest.

Controls: Below Average

While this game offers more camera control than Blue Stinger does, its movement controls need a lot more work. The jumping is stiff, and the heroes' speed can't be adjusted in mid-step, awkwardly forcing them to stop first just to transition between walking and running.

Graphics: Above Average

Despite the environments suffering from a cookie-cutter repetitiveness at places, Illbleed looks more impressive than it plays. The well-detailed characters are animated fluidly, including the massive bosses. The blood effects are over-the-top excessive, and there is rarely any slowdown.

Audio: Above Average

The game sounds about as good as it looks. Gunfire thunders out, blunt weapons smash into their targets messily, and spilled blood gushes forth with loud, splattering noises. The cheesy voice acting (which is in English for all versions) can be perfect or annoying as hell, depending on one's taste for B-movies. The music isn't memorable on the whole, but it nicely completes the atmosphere. Much of it conveys feelings of slow, creeping horror that would be great for a more serious game, especially the tunes of the abandoned hostel and the shopping mall stages, but the rest is lighthearted enough to maintain the general mood of campiness.

Overall: Below Average

Like the B-movies that inspire it, Illbleed is an action game that's more concerned with having silly, stupid fun than demonstrating technical mastery of its art. The clunky movement controls, disconnected sense of combat, and miserable handling of the heroes' resources turn it into an incoherent mess. Those with a fetish for the weird may find something of interest here, but others are definitely better off with far superior games like Blue Stinger.