In the past I was lamenting about the fact that I didn’t have any games to play and nothing interesting seemed to be coming out soon. Now I seem to have more games than I know what to do with. They are all old, but they are still new to me. In addition to Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich, I’ve finished Tron 2.0. On the deck I’ve got Brothers in Arms and I bought Battlefield 2 and Call of Duty: Finest Hour for X-Box.
Right now though, I’m playing one of the weirdest FPS games I’ve played in a long while. That game is Nitro Family. Never heard of it? Neither had I. The reason I’m playing it is that it is by the same team that is making Huxley.
In Nitro Family you play a guy trying to rescue his son. The weird part is that you go through the game carrying your wife on your back in some kind of seat. If a bad guy gets to close she automatically uses a whip to sever their heads off. You can also hit a button and she will fly into the air and carpet bomb an area.
It used the Serious Sam engine so it looks like and kind of plays like it, only there aren’t as many bad guys at a time. However, they do still just run straight at you. They also get stuck a lot of the time so you hear footprints and have to look around to find the stuck guy if you want to kill him.
It uses a neat combo system where you have two guns at a time with the left and right mouse buttons controlling the left and right gun. If you shoot a guy into the air, you can shoot him again to get a combo which gives you points that you can use to upgrade the guns.
The level design is not that great. There are lots of places where there isn’t anything, but it looks like there should be and they just ran out of time. There are also some places where I’ve been able to get to places where htey obviously didn’t want me to go so I could walk through stuff. Unlike Serious Sam where there were secrets everywhere there aren’t really any here. Also there are lots of places where it looks like it would be fun to jump up and climb on stuff and either you can’t because they just made it too tall, or if you can get up there, there’s no point.
It is quite possibly the greatest flawed game ever.