In the old days (you know, the early ’90s), if you wanted to play high-octane action games, you bought yourself a Nintendo, a Sega Genesis or a PlayStation.
But as the millennium winds down and CPUs become more powerful, the gap between the two platforms continues to close. Case in point: Activision’s graphically rich PC version of “Nightmare Creatures,” which is also available for PlayStation. Filled with lots of button-mashing, monster-hacking action, “Creatures” shows the power and speed of second-generation Pentiums.
The plot: In 19th Century London, a mad scientist named Adam Crowley has stolen a journal filled with the perverse experiments of a cult called the Brothers of Hecate. Now, Crowley has resurrected the brotherhood with himself as leader and has been using its secrets to unleash infectious demon spawn throughout the city. It is up to you as either retired priest Ignatius Blackward or Nadia F, daughter of an American immunologist, to end the spread of the disease before it’s too late.
Playability: This one has console written all over it. The plot is serviceable, but the developers, Kalisto Entertainment, could just as easily have skipped the cut scenes and called it “Kill ‘Em All,” and it would still be as much fun. The 3-D graphics show off the power of high-end Pentiums, and with a 3-D accelerator, the dynamic lighting and fog effects will give you the feeling that you actually are prowling the dank streets of London. On our P II-266, the character movement was smooth even at a high resolution of 1,024-by-768.
The player view is third person, but the free-roaming camera takes some getting used to. In the heat of battle, it can be quite disorienting to have the view suddenly swing around from behind the player to a side view. Both characters have several special combination moves that make slicing and dicing the 21 different monsters a veritable ballet of violence.
It’s even possible to dismember your enemies piece by piece. But beware, a headless zombie will still come after you. The format is pretty standard, with powerups and weapons upgrades hidden throughout the 16 levels, and the usual levers and switches allow you to go from one challenge to the next.
As with many 3-D games, there are problems. It is not uncommon to find yourself standing in a wall or some other stationary object, but this is a minor annoyance. A much bigger annoyance is the console-style save feature, which forces you to complete a level before saving. On a console with little memory this is expected, but on a PC it’s unnecessary.
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Minimum system requirements:
Windows 95; 133 MHz Pentium; 16 megabytes of RAM; 20 MB hard disk space; video card with 1 MB of RAM hardware; acceleration for high-res graphics.
