Nightmare Creatures

The Good
Nightmare Creatures wants very badly to knock the player's socks off by presenting traditional beat 'em up gameplay in a wonderfully atmospheric and gothic Victorian London setting. In this world, a wizard named Adam Crowley is using his occult tomes to summon forth terrifying abominations and cruel creatures to do his bidding, plunging London into terror. Stepping forward to fight Crowley's legions are Ignatius, a wizened monk with a giant staff, and Natasha, his nimble, sword-wielding protégé.

Kalisto did a fantastic job with the atmosphere, presenting 19th century London with all of the cobblestones, fog, and gothic architecture you would expect. The soundtrack, composed by Kalisto's rock-musician-in-residence Frédéric Motte, meshes with the stages beautifully. The graphics, while primitive by today's standards, looked awesome in 1997 and still retain a certain simplistic charm. You don't have to squint to figure out you're fighting a werewolf, and for many of these early 3D beat 'em ups, that's about the best you can ask.

The Bad
While the level design and soundtrack are spot-on, the nuts and bolts of the game itself have some flaws which keep it firmly in the mediocre category. Chief among these is the way almost every creature in the game is a gigantic damage sponge. Most games of this sort allow you to inflict gradual damage on enemies to wear them down through basic attacks, but Nightmare Creatures forces you to use its built-in combination system in order to dismember and decapitate your foes. This sounds like a great idea in theory, but in practice it leads to a slow learning curve of what works against each enemy type, and then using that move to pretty much the exclusion of all else each time you encounter one. The first few times you obliterate an enemy and see a blood-splattered orgy of flying limbs, it's awesome. By the time you've hacked up your twentieth zombie though, the gore has sort of run its course and you remember you're just pressing buttons.

It doesn't help that the controls are too loose for a beat 'em up either. It's easy to whiff shots that should have connected, and to get locked into an animation that unloads numerous misdirected attacks while the enemies maul you from every angle but the front. The built-in inventory system is also clunky and annoying to use, especially in the heat of combat. There's also no way to manually control the camera, which can lead to no end of annoyance in any 3D title, but especially to a game so wedded to the idea of moving and attacking a plethora of foes.

The Bottom Line
Nightmare Creatures is not for novice gamers. It demands a level of expertise and precision that exceeds its weight class. The gothic presentation, creepy creatures, and blood-drenched combat may hold your interest for a few stages, but it doesn't take long for the flickering polygons and dial-a-combo dismemberment system to haul the game back to earth. If you love all things horror, and don't mind putting up with some frustrating gameplay elements, then Nightmare Creatures was absolutely made for you. If your expectations run more along the lines of "Final Fight, but with werewolves!", you'll probably be undone by the game's imperfections by stage three. This is one of those 32-bit era titles where watching a longplay is more enjoyable than picking up the controller yourself.