A Review of Cryo Interactive games on the PS1
In the last few months, I played through a bunch of games developed or published by Cryo Interactive on the PlayStation 1. In fact, it was almost all Cryo PS1 games, except the various Myst-like adventure games they made, and a few others that didn’t catch my interest. In this post I’d like to summarize my opinions about them.
Hellboy: Dogs of the Night
This might actually be the best “conventionally good” game on this list. Mostly wandering about, adventuring, a few puzzles, a bit of combat here and there. The graphics, the environments, level design, characterizations, everything is pretty good. The only big problem I had with this game is a long section towards the end, where there is a large sewer maze in which you have to find various switches and things, and everything just looks the same. I had to start drawing a map, and even struggled with that.
The Guardian of Darkness
I suppose this game is actually kinda similar to Hellboy. It’s mostly an adventure game of sorts, you progress by talking to people, finding and using specific items, using your spells and so on. The gameplay is nothing special, the “puzzles” can be very obtuse, and the items and your spells in particular can have very specific and unclear uses. Where the game shines in my opinion is in its goofy scenarios. Each mission is pretty different in its theme and presentation, and there are many weird, strange, and silly things happening. One time you’re in a diner in Texas, fighting a French chef ghost, another time you’re walking through the netherworld, collecting magic letters for a demon baby.
Virus: It Is Aware
Based on a fairly meh movie, this is a simple action game that does its thing well enough. I can’t really complain much about anything here, it’s nothing special, and definitely pretty budget and jank, but you can have a decent time playing through it.
Hard Boiled
Another licensed title, this game is based on a Frank Miller comic, but you’d barely even notice while playing. It’s a very short rail shooter, very generic, but not bad. There are even branching paths in at least one stage.
The Raven Project
Now here’s an interesting one. The gameplay is very basic, kind of a 3D space shooter, and sometimes on planets, even with walking mechs or vehicles instead of flying fighters. It’s very simple and barebones, but it plays ok. But then the cutscenes! This game has a real FMV sci-fi story, told in its cutscenes. Think Wing Commander or maybe Babylon 5, with a lot less budget, but still making it work. There are people on board of fake spaceships, and evil aliens in strange face masks. The cutscenes actually tie together into a coherent story, and are even told from different perspectives. Good stuff.
Similar to quite a few of the games in this list, The Raven Project also has a PC version. Not so similar to the other games, the PC version of The Raven Project seems to be a very different game, not a 3D action game, maybe more like a rail shooter or gallery shooter. But it still has the FMV cutscenes, maybe even more of them.
Dreams
Dreams is based on Cryo’s PC game Dreams to Reality, but severely cut down. Where Dreams to Reality is a large dream-like adventure, with an actually mostly understandable story and journey, Dreams reduces this to just a bunch of simple 3D and 2.5D platforming stages. It still visits many of the same places as the PC game, but does not tie them together much, with cutscenes in-between that don’t make much sense anymore. It also doesn’t play all that well, especially in some of the boss fights.
Play Dreams to Reality though, that’s at least an A tier game.
Pax Corpus
Pax Corpus was meant to be another licensed title, based on Aeon Flux, but they lost the license and reworked the game. Now it is about some kind of brainwashing technology, which even shows up as a gameplay mechanic. I actually like Pax Corpus quite a bit. It’s pretty clunky and janky, but that’s just base level “Cryo on a console”. It does have a lot of flavor though. It’s the good kind of bad. I particularly enjoy the first boss fight, which is the slowest close-up gun fight you’ve ever seen, and the only way to hurt the boss is to hit an electrical box behind them with the right timing, so they stand in front of it when it blows up.
360: Three Sixty
This is a futuristic boat racing game, with the gimmick that your boat has a gun turret that can be rotated. The problem there is that you can only rotate it from a first person view, so you can’t see where you’re going or even steer your boat while rotating your turret. In effect, the turret is only useful for shooting forwards, or backwards in the first person view because that’s where it starts in that mode. The racing itself feels similar to Wipeout, kinda floaty but not in a bad way. This is another game that’s entirely fine, it’s nothing special but you can have an ok time playing it.
Ubik
Ubik is a novel by Philip K. Dick, and as typical for that author, it’s about an uncertain and changing reality. Cryo turned that into a realtime squad tactics game. The story didn’t really lend itself to that, and they only follow the novel vaguely and lose all of the author’s style and typical elements, but they actually followed the major plot beats much more than I expected.
The game itself though is the most broken and unfinished thing I’ve played in a while. The “tactics” are barely there, it feels more like Cannon Fodder, and your squad just has to kill the enemies quickly enough so they can’t kill you. The enemies often just stand around and don’t notice that you’re there and killing their comrades, or they file into a room one after the other, so you can pick them off separately.
Ubik uses prerendered graphics with fixed camera perspectives, like a Resident Evil, but rooms usually have several perspectives you can switch between. Often the camera perspective will not actually show your team or the enemies. Especially when it automatically switches cameras, it often picks the worst and most useless views. Switching between views also always incurs load times, from a few seconds to frequently over 30 seconds, just because you’re switching cameras for the first time in a newly loaded area.
The game, its UI, and the manual promise many game systems that just don’t seem to be there. You can buy ammo for your guns, even different kinds, but the guns don’t actually seem to consume ammo. Your HQ has several floors that can supposedly be used to train your team, research their PSI skills and so on, but nothing of that is actually there. The manual promises many different PSI-skills, but in the game you’re just clicking one of two symbols on a PSI agent and then maybe they’ll do something, often to unclear effect. The manual mentions a “Cyberspace” and makes it sound similar to the Matrix in Shadowrun, but in the game it only appears one time, and is basically just a password input, and the password is just in the mission briefing.
I was browsing old PC game magazines recently, and actually came upon a very positive review of Ubik. That makes me wonder whether the PC version is the “finished” version of this game, with the features they describe being present and intact. Based on my impression of the PS1 version, I find it unlikely, but I do want to find out some time.
Asterix and Obelix: Take on Caesar
This game is based on the first live-action Asterix movie, and all it does is turn some scenes from the movie into what are basically Game & Watch-style minigames. It is such a nothing game. The visuals are nice enough, but that’s all there is.