No Escape Review

The weapons are interesting, but unfortunately there are only seven or eight different types. Zapper, the basic weapon is definitely the ugliest of the lot. It's totally harmless, and the balls it pukes up show only every god-knows-which frame. They should have put something else instead of those little balls, because they (and probably the fact that I'm not used to playing 3rd person shooters where you move your moonwalking characters around with a mouse) were to blame that I got bored with this game in the first place. Only after I found some other weapons (set my mouse sensitivity and embraced the fact that none of the characters will run, ever) things started to get better, and for some reason, I started to find the game quite interesting.

If you want to skip the boring bit and start enjoying the game from the very start, never try to attack anyone with a Zapper or Electro Bolt, because you'll always achieve far better results with, say, rocket launcher, bazooka, bombs or Plasma Gun (mmmmm). Rocket launcher is five times as lethal (wait is this a correct term for a non-violent game) as Zapper; each time you hit someone with a Zapper, he'll drop a coin worth a measly $1000 dollars (measly? Boy, would I like to have a bag of those measly coins :), and each successful shot from the rocket launcher will give you $5000 and the chance to corner your victim and finish him off. Like in all shooters, the basic ammo is available all over the maps, but you'll have some trouble reaching places hiding things like double damage, teleport or invisibility... Oh, did I mention that health is important too?

The game features several mods, but all of them are déjà vu. It's focused on multiplayer mode and even the single player mode comes down to bot arenas. The whole thing resembles FFA of any first-person shooter (like the stages in Unreal Tournament), with a slight difference - You have to reach certain amount of money rather than frags. I personally preferred the Countdown mod, in which all players have time bombs attached to them, and have to prevent it from exploding. Good play and neutralizing your opponents will postpone the detonation. The score is based on how many times your bomb exploded. The rest of the modes include Knockout, Tag and unavoidable CTF (your flag doesn't have to be in base in order for you to score) and team variants of the aforementioned mods...

If you don't manage to find and friends for carnage, you'll just have to cope with the extremely stupid bots. Even on the hard level, they tend to stand still while you attack them from behind or get stuck against a wall or something. I expected them to be a bit smarter and more aggressive on the hard level. However, they show no interest in gathering new weapons energy or even money. Though I have to say that I did see the bots act reasonably on some levels; like rushing to pick up rocket-launcher in Catacombs.

This is what No Escape actually looks like. As much as I got bored at first I enjoyed playing it later. Still, be it because I'm not too good with 3D 3rd person multiplayer shooters with no first-person view, or because of the fact that this game had been made for younger players and not old bats like me, I couldn't make myself play it for more than several days.