Nocturne

The Good
Yes this game is definitely more of an action title than a horror. Nocturne packs thrills and firefights around just about every corner. If only Terminal Reality would have made some sequels, then I think this series could have really shone.

In Nocturne you are thrust into the role of The Stranger, the mysterious and gravelly voiced bad-ass, with a skill for killing the things that most men fear. An agent of The Spookhouse, an agency funded by the government to fight the things that go bump in the night. Nocturne features are great back story and plot in general. Nocturne also does a good job of mixing history with the supernatural. And it pays homage to all the horror gods. Stoker, Poe, Shelly, and Lovecraft. Among others. The game unfolds over several years as the story comes full circle. It is a shame we never got to see more Nocturne games. Nocturne would also make an interesting movie, or graphic novel.

The Graphics are incredible. Even today, years after the games initial release it still looks great, either using software rendering, or if it is supported your 3D card. Lighting effects and shadows are all realistic looking and nice to look at. The characters are all well designed and unique. The Stranger is such a cool character! The monsters are appropriately creepy. The back rounds are pre-rendered, and are all sharp, and clean. Be warned this game is very dark. You will either have to play in the dark or turn up your monitors brightness. Playing in the dark is more fun however.

All is well in the sound department. The voices are all appropriate to the character that they belong to. The sound effects are a little loud but convincing. And the music what little there is all good, particularly the ending theme, the only one that has lyrics.

The Gameplay is where the game drops the ball. The missions are all well designed and can be great fun, but the execution is where the game falters.

The Bad
The imprecise controls make jumping and dodging harder than they need to be. Further frustrating is the fact that there are some parts of the game where you have to make a jump or die. And you probably will die many times at these parts. You can save your game at any point so be sure to do so at these points. Also The Stranger’s greatest enemy is not a werewolf or vampire, but the games camera. Which cannot not be manually controlled. And the game almost always picks the worst camera angle possible. Making this game to much like the horrid Resident Evil series.

The Bottom Line
Fans of horror will find a lot to like here. But this one is far from perfect. Also be warned that this game carries a M rating for a reason. The is graphic violence. Like limbs being blown and ripped off. Gratuitous language, and nudity.

The Good
Nocturne has a rather interesting approach to it's layout. Rather than being put into a single, large adventure, you are given several smaller adventures which the main character, the stranger, experiences. This means you essentially get 4 different adventures within one overall story as well as a brief finale which opens up once the first 4 are all complete. This works very well and keeps the variety level high. The stranger is one of the coolest hero characters in any video game. Wearing a hat, dark glasses and a long trenchcoat he looks slightly reminisent of Caleb, the hero from 'Blood'. His dark, say what you think attitude and deadpan approach to conversation often leads to some funny lines. The graphics are utterly beautiful. Light shines realistically on walls and cloth flows wonderfully. The sound is equally impressive with some great orchestral music and beefy effects, the voice acting isn't bad either. The combat system in Nocturne is controlled with the mouse as your aiming device. This coupled with the laser slights that the stranger has equipped on his firearms make for the best and most intuitive system yet seen in a survival horror game, a genre usually plagued with poor combat.

The Bad
The action is very combat oriented so although there is a fair amount of adventuring to to aswell, you'll be firing a LOT of bullets by the end. Also the game isn't terribly scary. It has its moments but you never feel like you might be in serious trouble because you are always tooled up. There are points where you can get yourself in a lock if a group of creatures back you up against a wall and all you can do is wait 'till you die or restore a saved game. Finally, the wonderful graphics do come at a price in the system requirements. You're going to need a Pentium 3 and a decent graphics card to run this game at full speed and detail.

The Bottom Line
Nocturne is a great survival horror title that fans of the genre who like their fighting frenetic would be wise to check out.

The Good
I must admit that the first time I played Nocturne I hated it. I mean, the graphics were not dark, the main character was this silly bad-ass wannabe, and the whole package was plagued with common places: vampires, zombies, werewolves, et cetera. I played this one right after I finished Clive Barker's Undying and I expected another 'serious' horror title with a mature and intelligent plot. It wasn't until I decided to give it another chance that I got the joke. Nocturne is not a 'serious' horror game. Nocturne doesn't innovate because it wasn't intended to.

Technically the game is good. Controlling has all the good and bad of a horror-survival a la Alone in the Dark, but adds some interesting uses for the mouse, wich gives you some more freedom of movement. I still prefer the freedom that only FPS can give, but I must admit Nocturne may be one of the smoothest games to play in its genre.

The atmosphere won't scare anyone (unless you still get scared with the Bela Lugosi kind of movies) but as I said, I don't think that was the idea. Nocturne seems to be more of a tribute to old horror movies, plagued with Film Noir cliches as to spice it up. The graphics are all dyied with this brownish colour that makes the whole picture look like an old movie. Besides that, the background designing is great.

The animation is fine, all the characters move in a very natural way... well, given the species each of them belong to. I specially liked the way Stranger's coat moves (and how it reacts to the wind, the running, the walking...); and the quite realistic movements of a girl you find tied to a bed in the fourth mission.

I loved the gore details, they are quite exaggerated and that makes them brilliant. The way the blood spills, the blood stains on floors and walls, the different ways the monsters die (sometimes they just fall on their knees, sometimes they start to lose limbs one by one until they die, sometimes the blow up in thousands of pieces), how they pick up their own severed limbs and attack you with them... sickly gore.

The monsters are indeed all those creatures we suffered millions of times in millions of Class-Z movies. If you can deal with this, the monsters are great. Once again, you won't find any innovation here, but all the characters play their part perfectly and are very well designed.

Same goes for the plot, even the few twists are all predictable; and noone can seriously consider it immersive at all; it doesnt' scare you and at times it gets so ridiculously cliched you just can't take it seriously. But then again, when you watch a Horror Classic this is the kind of thing you expect to find.

The music and the sound effects greatly add to the whole atmosphere. Here they are, all the cliched musical scores that will make you remember every pre-1980 horror movie you ever saw.

Every horror/survival title has two main characteristics: action and puzzles. In Nocturne, there are both of them; and both are great. The action sequences are not stupidly easy neither they are frustrating hard. The interface is smooth enough to make them challenging but not impossible. As for he puzzles, they are quite a couple. If you play the missions in order, you will find them more often and increasingly hard as you move on, but they keep easy enough as to be understandable by anyone. As for the missions, it was a very good idea to offer them as seperate levels you can play in any order you want.

The Bad
There isn't really much to complain about Nocturne. Everything that looks 'bad' looks that way because it was intended to.

I can't get to like the way you control the character in this kind of games. Although Nocturne's interface is pretty smooth and I didn't find any serious issues (like the hot-spots thing in AITD4), I miss the freedom of movement that only FPS's can give.

I think the plot doesn't intend to innovate, and maybe it is naive on purpouse, but sometimes it gets TOO naive, borderline stupid. Some characters need some more work and some (like the hook-handed Coronel) would have been better left out of the picture.

I really didn't get what they wanted to do with the Night Vision. It may be the most USELESS feature I EVER bumped into in a game. I never really needed it in any place of the whole game, and when I tried to make use of it 'just for kicks', I found it wouldn't help in any sort of way. I just don't dare to call it 'a bad feat', but I sure don't understand what was it intended to be.

This one is maybe silly, but I HATE the way Stranger holds some of the weapons. Walking around with the hands in the air like he does with the two pistols makes him look like a zombie, or just a stupid guy. Same goes to the way he uses the axes and swords. In this case his movements reminds me of those toy birds that you push with a finger and they swing their heads back and forth.

The Bottom Line
Film Noir meets Horror Classics. Get every cliche of both genres, put them in a blender; and voila: you got Nocturne. This game doesn't innovate nor scare. Nocturne is just a tribute to horror classics.

Other than that, the interface lets you play smoothly, the graphics are good, the music matches up perfectly; and the game overall is FUN. Nocturne doesn't invent anything, but it does it perfectly.

The Good
Graphically, Nocturne is a beautiful game. The engine works great with lighting and shadows. Generally has good voice acting. Interesting premise and fairly good level design too.

The Bad
1. Nocturne really isn't that scary. Why? Because the main character doesn't give a damn. He doesn't react to the monsters, he just shoots them. So if he isn't concerned why should we be? Also, the only scares Nocturne can establish are the surprise scares- monsters jumping through windows, etc. No real sense of dread here.

1. Controls suck. The Nocturne engine looks great, but there are some serious clipping problems. Shooting works fine, and the character models sustain localized damage (ie, you can shoot someone's arm off,) but hand to hand combat is terrible. Running, walking, jumping are all way too challenging and inaccurate.

2. Bad camera. There are terrible camera angles in this game. Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil style camera angles work well within buildings, but sections of Nocturne involve running through the woods. This is horrible. Many times I fell to my death, only because the camera angle did not show how close I was to a cliff. The combination of poor camera angles and poor controls killed me more than any monster.

The Bottom Line
Poorly designed "survival horror" game focuses too much on graphics not enough on gameplay.

The Good
First of all, the graphics in this game are amazingly detailed. Everything from a balcony crumbling under your feet to the main character's trench coat waving in the wind seems to have been honed to realistic quality. The movement of all creatures (human or otherwise) on the screen are very real-looking. You don't see any of the inconsistencies in the graphics like being able to walk partially through a wall or whatnot. The storyline is equally well-developed. Everything that happens has a distinct, well-explained reason. It goes far beyond "Hey, there's werewolves here, go blow 'em up."

The Bad
The interface is brutal. If you don't have the instruction manual, you will never be able to play this game (and since my Dad's dog pooped on it, it looks like Nocturne will sit on a shelf and collect dust for quite a while). The camera angles are difficult as well. There are quite a few locations in which players will die several times because something is blocking their view of the scene. And, most notably, Nocturne just isn't very, well... Horrific. Most of the scary parts are monsters jumping out from around a corner. The plot itself doesn't really add any fear effect, mainly because of the attitude of the characters that there is no way in hell that you will ever fail in your mission.

The Bottom Line
Nocturne is a Steven King novel (maybe one of those that would get a movie deal) trapped in a computer game's body. It's great to look at, but actually playing it is something else. There is invariably a point in every level in which you will get stuck and just run around in circles until you give up. You'd be better off watching scary movies.

The Good
This game had several strong points going for it. The characters are interesting, complete with personalities and unique abilities. The game has a lot of cool dialogue and interaction. All four episodes had a good story involved. No illogical puzzles or busywork.

The graphics are amazing. Background scenes looked really good. The rendered shadows were very cool. However, on a current p4 computer, the Strangers coat looking like it was pulsing instead of being thrashed by the wind. Very effective job with light and shadows.

The sound was great. The voice actors did a good job. The recordings were top notch. Unlike some games, you don't need to adjust the volume every so often. Music was influenced by 60's style horror movie scores like "Psycho."

The Bad
The actual gameplay. More than once I've had a character stuck in place with no way to get out. I had to save my game every 3 screens and hope for the best.The controls are very sluggish and unresponsive. A very limited interaction with the environment. Weird sound and graphic bugs crop up frequently, destroying any immersive mood. An unusually high disgust factor after trying to overcome all the above listed flaws.

The Bottom Line
Turn on the god mode and play it like a movie. You'll enjoy it more.