No Escape Review

Try to imagine some sort of a Blade-Runner-like future ruled by ruthless industry giants and mega-corporations, but with a cartoonish, kiddy twist (yeah, I know it sounds weird). The biggest TV station managed to design the coolest and most popular TV show ever - No Escape. A special orbital station has been built to serve as a studio for this show. This humongous complex contains small planets that take less than a minute to run around. This is what makes them this interesting, cause once on them, there's no escape...

And when billions of spectators do tune in on the little planets, they're in store for some show: up to eight funny little players running around, collecting weapons, shooting at each other and getting well paid to do that...

No Escape is a third-person multiplayer shooter with no streams of blood or violent killing meant basically for kids. Well, OK, the violence bit does sound a bit fishy if we have in mind that you still DO have to use various bombs, bazookas, rocket launchers and similar weapons in order to get rid of your tedious enemies; and while you're filling them with lead/electricity they turn red, and finally explode, only to leave their shoes with smoke coming out behind them. That does sound a wee bit violent to me. At first I did not even realize there was no blood in the game... ah, what the heck...

The things in this game that will probably appeal to younger generations most are the funny characters and the surroundings. Everything is neatly designed, colorful and cheerful. The graphics reminded me of Tonic Trouble and Rayman 2: The Great Escape. I even thought at first that it uses the same engine as these games: not only do the textures somehow look alike; the engines even share the same flaws like having incredibly small number of polygons used for surroundings. Though, I must say that good textures stuck to low-poly objects can cover this decently. No Escape appealed to me mostly because of its eye candy I had the chance to see in screenshots that could have been found on the net with tons of lighting effects, fog, and explosions... It seems that the programmer strived to achieve the quality of the fantastic pre-rendered animations that take up most of this disk. This is one of the few games that made me want to see all animations from intro to each character's introduction. They are all very interesting and relatively short, so you can never get bored watching...

A variety of cartoonish characters will take part in this massacre of a show. Most of them irresistibly resemble celebrities; for instance Karen Kurtz, the cop is a spitting image of Lara Croft, agent Massimo looks like he just came out of the Matrix, and as for Bratney, well, take a wild guess... Now, the in-game characters are somewhat different than the cinematics... They have a severe lack of both polygons and frames (you could say they all look a bit like Michael Jackson moonwalking on the terrain, rather than running). The sound samples slightly improve the general impression with comments like "Hmmm.... Girrrly boy", agent Massimo's squealing "Hey! Watch my suit!" or the country music following Hank Hardy...