Abuse

The Good
This 1996 run-and-gun platformer from Crack dot Com (unfortunately now defunct) is a flawed one, but an amazing and innovative game nonetheless. It's probably most well known for its unusual control system, where you use the mouse to aim and fire, and the arrow keys on your keyboard to move and jump. Kind of clunky at times, but once you get used to it, it works fine, and makes for a unique gaming experience, playing not much like other platform games.

Abuse has the feel of a science fiction horror movie. It's just you, alone (with your awesome weapons) inside a dark prison, battling clusters upon clusters of giant ants, and some robots. The graphics are dark and photo realistic, and the music is intense, thus contributing to the game's atmosphere. In a lot of the levels, there are lots of quiet moments where you feel you will suddenly encounter a horde of screaming ants trying to kill you. I must agree with what YID YANG said in his review of Phantasmagoria that this is basically what makes a horror movie/game scary. Not the monsters themselves; just the quiet, tense moments, and the jumping scares when something happens. (Slender anyone?)

Of course, to encounter such monsters, you have an assortment of awesome, powerful weapons on hand that you can use, provided that you have the ammo for them. Your default weapon is a laser shooter thing that always fires with or without "ammo", but such "ammo" improves its firing rate. All your other weapons will require ammo, and may be necessary a lot of times. These weapons include a grenade launcher, missile launcher, plasma shooter, and a super awesome flame thrower that will easily torch any horde of ants to a crisp. There are also powerups that you can use, like a jet pack that gives you the ability to fly, and a booster that lets you run 2 times faster. Like some of your weapons, these powerups may be crucial for solving some parts of the levels.

And the levels themselves are complex, and require some simple puzzle solving skills. You'll be making use of teleporters, switches, ladders, elevators, doors, and such, in order to complete some parts of the level. There's also breakable walls that explode when fired upon, and often contain hidden powerups or switches, or a passage to another area in the level. A lot of levels require some thinking in order to complete. Along with the puzzle of doors/teleporters/switches/etc, you have to, of course, battle hordes of ants and robots bent on causing your demise. You'll want to make use of the "consoles" that save the state of your game, because in some areas you'll likely die a lot, and keep trying until you finally make it. And when you do beat a level, it is very rewarding.

All in all, Abuse is a totally unique platform game with complex level design, excellent graphics, innovative gameplay, and a dark atmosphere. You will enjoy this game if you like horror games in particular.

The Bad
Truth be told, the control system in this game can be quite clunky at times. For one thing, using the mouse to aim and fire took some getting used to for me, when I first played it. Using the powerups, however, took even more getting used to. Especially the jet pack powerup that allows the character to fly. You use a powerup by holding down the right mouse button. When using the jet pack with the mouse, it is my instinct to move the mouse in flight, in order to move the character around. But no, moving the mouse is for aiming your gun, so you have to use the arrow keys. This makes it very frustrating at times. It works when you get used to it, but I'm not particularly fond of it. The overall game difficulty can get kind of frustrating as well.

Sadly, this game hasn't really stood the test of time, as its popularity has decreased over the years since Crack dot Com closed down and released the source code, and several Abuse fan sites/resources are now dead, with the community being much less active than it used to be.

The Bottom Line
A few flaws notwithstanding, Abuse is an excellent and unique cult classic platform game. I recommend giving it a try if you like platform games, and also games with a science fiction horror setting. Since the public domain release of the source code, there's been some work on it. It's been ported to SDL, and is available for Linux as freeware, with all the registered content from the full game. There's also a 32-bit Windows port available, which I've been able to find on Desura and Mod DB. There's also an iPhone port called "Abuse Classic". Or you might be able to find a copy of the DOS game somewhere, like in a garage sale or flee market.

Whatever way you obtain it, enjoy this forgotten gem, and thank me later.

The Good
In the year 2009, rebel leader Nick Vrenna is captured and taken to a high-security prison where illegal military experiments have created bloodthirsty genetic mutations. All inhabitants of the prison, except Nick, become infected. A prison riot inside the complex goes horribly wrong, and, having found out that he is uninfected, Nick must escape the prison while blasting away monsters.

Those who have played Abuse consider it the Doom of platform games. Rather than just having four weapons you can use to destroy monsters, you have up to seven weapons, which is the maximum amount of weapons that you can have in Doom. Each weapon (which features classics as the shotgun, homing missiles, grenade launchers, and flamethrowers) trigger quite an explosion when they come in contact with a monster.

Abuse has a dark theme to it, therefore the game is meant to be played with the lowest gamma correction setting. You can still make out the game's scenery, and some of this scenery includes alien nests, factories, and even windows that you can look out through to view the city. This dark theme enhances the gameplay. The gray background, which you most likely see, fits the prison setting rather well.

Nick is drawn nicely. As he is running around, you can see that he actually has robot legs and he looks funny running around in these. The enemies look good and have excellent AI. Some of the monsters hang on the ceiling and wait for you to flip a switch before they make their attack. A whole bunch of them even jump out from holes in the wall. There are about twenty levels. Some only require you to get through them, while others are a puzzle, requiring you to flip a series of switches to open certain doors or to deactivate barriers.

What I like about Abuse is the built-in editor which you can use to your advantage. With the editor, you can turn on invincibility, but the main power of it is giving you the ability to customize the levels as you progress for it. The level editor is simple to use. (It took me less than ten minutes to learn it.) You can add or delete part of the backgrounds or remove certain objects from the level. If you find an obstacle that you can't get past, for example, you are free to remove it. If you want to jet yourself up to an area but can't find the appropriate power-up, then add it into the game. You can also load levels and play them if you do not want to play the game in sequence.

The music in the introduction sets the game up. This piece of music is in stereo sound, the first time that I noticed. Some notes pan from your left speaker to your right speaker, and vice versa. The sound effects in the game sound as if they come straight from Doom, with certain enemies making grunting noises when they are waiting for you, and sounds as they approach you or get killed.

The Bad
What sets Abuse apart from other platform games is that you have to use both the mouse and keyboard to shoot. You use the keyboard to move Nick and jump, and the mouse to aim upwards, fire, or put your power-up to good use. This is not the way that I play platform games, using two input devices at once. When I aim at a monster and fire, it is very likely that I lose a lot of health as a monster right beside me is giving me quite a pounding. Using two devices also wastes a lot of time.

Although there is some nice scenery in the game, the graphics get rather boring all of a sudden. No matter where you are, almost everything seems gray. There are symbols on each power-up that indicate what they do, but since there is no writing on them, I couldn't make heads or tails with these. The only way that I knew was to bring up the object list in the level editor, see what the object names are, and place them on the map.

You are required to have the MPU-401/Roland sound cards installed in your machine to hear the music in the game. Sound Blaster is not supported as a music type. So if you haven't got MPU-401, then you're out of luck.

The Bottom Line
In Abuse, you must escape a prison while you blast away monsters and flip switches in order to gain access to certain areas. The plot differs from the commercial and shareware versions of the game. I believe that this is the first platform game ever to force you to use two input devices at once, and you may find it difficult just to do this. This is the first game that Crack dot Com released, and we knew what we could expect from them in the future. It is just too bad that the company went bankrupt when they finished this game, but at least it has been released in the public domain.

The Good
I give the author credit for using a custom Lisp interpreter for scripting (Abuse is not, as is mentioned in another review, fully written in Lisp; there's far more C code than Lisp code). The control scheme is novel.

The Bad
It plays like a typical jump around and find the buttons platform shooter. Nothing new here.

The Bottom Line
If you've played any of the hundreds of platform games for the NES, SNES, or Genesis, you'll be unimpressed. If this is your first exposure to the genre, then you may enjoy it.