Island Peril

The Good
You're kidding me, right? This game sucks.

The Bad
Just about everything else. To start with, Island Peril controls terribly, and there's no way to change the default control layout. Keyboard controls feel randomly assigned, while mouse control is utterly painful: even with the sensitivity set at maximum, jamming the mouse forward wouldn't even move my character a footstep! Sure, you can tell that your character is moving, but the movement is just so horribly slow that you'll prefer the already awful keyboard controls over the mouse movement. Couple this with the horrible response times from the controls (which sometimes took up to two full seconds to respond), and you have the electronic equivalent of driving drunk. Hey, at least this adds some challenge to a game that's severely hampered by brain-dead AI: enemies will wait up to five seconds before they actually shoot at you! Even then, their shots don't cause that much damage, and there's a more-than-plentiful supply of full-health kits and "200% armor" pickups (which strangely happen to be raincoats -- how realistic!) on each level. To put it simply, the game is way too easy, even with its god-awful control scheme. To make matters even worse, the developers managed to completely suck the fun out of firing a weapon. The weapon models and animations are laughable, the death animations for the enemies are unconvincing, and the weapon sound effects are even worse.

That brings us to the presentation. The game performs abysmally on all accounts, leaving you with a thoroughly unattractive product. The graphics are unbelievably pixelated and detail-challenged, and would have looked bad even in 1991 -- yet, this is in a 1995 game! The audio is simplistic and bland, and the music doesn't fare much better. I've heard flatulence that sounded better than this. The voice acting seems really rushed, and sounds just plain dorky. As for the interface, I've seen console games that are more customizable than this piece of crap! Aside from totally useless mouse sensitivity adjustment (like I mentioned, the mouse is horribly slow even at maximum sensitivity) and equally useless volume adjustment (you guessed it -- the sound effects are horribly quiet even at maximum volume), there are absolutely no options to adjust the game to your liking. (I don't really count adjustable difficulty settings as part of the interface, since it usually isn't in the "options" menu in a game anyways.)

The Bottom Line
Island Peril should never have seen the light of day. It is indeed the worst game ever made as of 1995, and still one of the worst today. Unless you're a masochistic player, Island Peril should be avoided by any means necessary.

If you're new to the genre, go play Doom. If you want a good Wolfenstein 3-D clone, go play Corridor 7. If you want a good Doom clone, go play Heretic. Either way, you'll have a much better time than with the sheer crap-fest that is Island Peril. It's just plain garbage.