BioForge

The Good
This is an action-adventure of grand proportions. The game has an excellent storyline, and a demanding but effective way of evolving the intricate plot. The game starts out with you waking up in an alien jail, as a nearly finished cyborg, with no memory whatsoever of your past, or even your name. From here on, the player is left completely on his/her own. This is what makes the game so great. There is a constant feeling of threat. Weird experiments, weird aliens and weird machines all threatens to kill your character. The game does not tell the player or show the way in any obvious way. There are clues, in the many, excellently written, journals that are scattered throughout the base, but the game offers an immense feeling of freedom, and confusion for that matter, this is a difficult game. You become very involved in the poor character's destiny and because the plot is so good you really do everything you can to find out more. The character descriptions in the journals are excellent and gripping, and I haven't seen anything like it since this game. When the end finally comes, the character has gone through changes, been through a lot of disturbing situations and seen things no human has ever seen before. Afterwards the game leaves you with an empty feeling in your stomach, hungry for more. Indeed a grand adventure.

The Bad
However a great game, it is a VERY difficult game. It is a must to save at many different locations. Do not use only one save-file, because you WILL find yourselves in situations where you are done with, where the only option is giving up, loading a previous game and trying a different approach. This can be very frustrating, when you think you've done something right, just to realize that you should have done something else first, and therefore are doomed to a certain death. This sometimes adds to the suspense and the great feeling of constant threat, but sometimes it just makes you crazy. It is not fun replaying large parts of the game just because you forgot some little thing. After all, the cyborg moves very clumsy and slowly, which can be frustrating in itself, especially in the action sequences. Imagine trying to fight a space marine when your character moves like a rusty old garbage-can. I especially recall a very frustrating sequence when the character is attacked by some strange robotic shrimps. It was hell beating them up. These aspects can make the game harder than it needs to be. It is challenging as it is already. Bad controls and extremely difficult puzzles and the fact that you have to do certain things in the right order, with very few clues on what to do, makes the game a bit frustrating at times.

The Bottom Line
A grand action adventure with one of the best plots, and best character-descriptions in the history of computer games. A game that is actually gripping, disturbing and exiting all at once.