Recently, after reading an old preview of Mortyr: 2093 -1944 in Secret Service, an ancient and now defunct Polish games magazine, I decided to unearth this lil' game and play it, expecting a rough, unpolished horror that I'd have to suffer through.
The premise? Using a time machine, the Nazis have acquired a powerful artifact from the future and used it to lead a devastating Winter assault in late 1944, defeating the western Allies and the Soviet Union, estabilishing their control over the globe. Their success, however, has hastened the Armageddon - strange weather phenomena begun to manifest and in 2093, they have reached their apex. Obersturmbannfuhrer Jurgen Mortyr, a dissident Nazi official, has discovered that this is due to the aforementioned time travel - Project Chronos has disturbed the fragile time-space continuum and doomed the world. Jurgen sends his son, Sebastian Mortyr, into the past, to 1944, to destroy the time machine. Due to a miscalculation, he landed outside the castle he was meant to infiltrate and is forced to fight through waves of enemy soldiers to destroy the sinister device. Then, back in the future, he has to ensure that history is not altered and destroy the artifact used by the Nazis to conquer the world.
It isn't anything special by any means, but it gets the job done. Personally, I'm a hound for alternate history games and science fiction. But when it gets combined with NAZI super science? It's a must play for me (even if it's basically a copy/paste of Kronolog: The Nazi Paradox). The storyline is all but absent in the actual game (with the exception of the odd journal entry here and there), which detracts from the experience significantly. This is 1999, the year of Opposing Force, so a game with almost no storyline whatsoever feels really dated. Wolfenstein 3D dated...
[spoiler:7f4f683c3f]
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As you can see above, the graphics are nothing special. Again, this is 1999 and we are looking at Quake 1 graphics when it comes to characters and weapons. Yes, they are charming in their comic book look, but when compared to the detailed grunts in OpFor or thugs in Kingpin, the game looks like a morgue on a bad day.
The environs you fight through save the game from being a total graphical failure. Cathedrals are appropriately intimidating and gloomy, castle interiors feel medieval and the future, well, looks futuristic. They feel good, but really, that's all you can say about them. Nothing in the game can hold a candle to the cliffs of Half-Life 1 or "Welcome To Black Mesa" from OpFor.
This opinion will change the moment you notice the nonsensical, gamey design of locations. An U-Boot dock several hundred meters underground with no underground river or caves for the submarines to access them? A rail station with rails ending in a brick wall? Machine park with no machines or exits to the surface? The game fails at creating convincing locales to fight in and no amount of graphical eye candy is going to distract the player long enough for him not to notice that fact.
[spoiler:7f4f683c3f]
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The gameplay isn't much better than location design. Weapons are well designed, each has a purpose and is useful in a different situation, but that's nothing new after Doom. Enemies aren't brain dead and actually move around, take cover and behave in accordance with their weapons (riflemen keep their distance, machine gunners charge in, grenadiers try to take the high ground and support others), but they certainly can't hold a candle to HL1 Marines or OpFor Black Ops. The game's lack of an actual storyline cripples the player's motivation. The game simply doesn't provide enough incentive to play on. It has its moments and some combat arenas are genuinely fun to play, but it simply fails to provide a thoroughly engaging experience. I played the game out of curiosity, not because I was truly interested in it. That's a bad thing. Especially in 1999.
In the end, it's an entirely forgettable experience. It's fun for a while, especially if you're interested in bad Polish games, but not worth any price tag. It isn't as bad as foreign reviews might make you think, but it isn't good either. A shame. A Nazi-controlled future of 2093 sounded interesting.
The premise? Using a time machine, the Nazis have acquired a powerful artifact from the future and used it to lead a devastating Winter assault in late 1944, defeating the western Allies and the Soviet Union, estabilishing their control over the globe. Their success, however, has hastened the Armageddon - strange weather phenomena begun to manifest and in 2093, they have reached their apex. Obersturmbannfuhrer Jurgen Mortyr, a dissident Nazi official, has discovered that this is due to the aforementioned time travel - Project Chronos has disturbed the fragile time-space continuum and doomed the world. Jurgen sends his son, Sebastian Mortyr, into the past, to 1944, to destroy the time machine. Due to a miscalculation, he landed outside the castle he was meant to infiltrate and is forced to fight through waves of enemy soldiers to destroy the sinister device. Then, back in the future, he has to ensure that history is not altered and destroy the artifact used by the Nazis to conquer the world.
It isn't anything special by any means, but it gets the job done. Personally, I'm a hound for alternate history games and science fiction. But when it gets combined with NAZI super science? It's a must play for me (even if it's basically a copy/paste of Kronolog: The Nazi Paradox). The storyline is all but absent in the actual game (with the exception of the odd journal entry here and there), which detracts from the experience significantly. This is 1999, the year of Opposing Force, so a game with almost no storyline whatsoever feels really dated. Wolfenstein 3D dated...
[spoiler:7f4f683c3f]
[/spoiler:7f4f683c3f]
As you can see above, the graphics are nothing special. Again, this is 1999 and we are looking at Quake 1 graphics when it comes to characters and weapons. Yes, they are charming in their comic book look, but when compared to the detailed grunts in OpFor or thugs in Kingpin, the game looks like a morgue on a bad day.
The environs you fight through save the game from being a total graphical failure. Cathedrals are appropriately intimidating and gloomy, castle interiors feel medieval and the future, well, looks futuristic. They feel good, but really, that's all you can say about them. Nothing in the game can hold a candle to the cliffs of Half-Life 1 or "Welcome To Black Mesa" from OpFor.
This opinion will change the moment you notice the nonsensical, gamey design of locations. An U-Boot dock several hundred meters underground with no underground river or caves for the submarines to access them? A rail station with rails ending in a brick wall? Machine park with no machines or exits to the surface? The game fails at creating convincing locales to fight in and no amount of graphical eye candy is going to distract the player long enough for him not to notice that fact.
[spoiler:7f4f683c3f]
[/spoiler:7f4f683c3f]
The gameplay isn't much better than location design. Weapons are well designed, each has a purpose and is useful in a different situation, but that's nothing new after Doom. Enemies aren't brain dead and actually move around, take cover and behave in accordance with their weapons (riflemen keep their distance, machine gunners charge in, grenadiers try to take the high ground and support others), but they certainly can't hold a candle to HL1 Marines or OpFor Black Ops. The game's lack of an actual storyline cripples the player's motivation. The game simply doesn't provide enough incentive to play on. It has its moments and some combat arenas are genuinely fun to play, but it simply fails to provide a thoroughly engaging experience. I played the game out of curiosity, not because I was truly interested in it. That's a bad thing. Especially in 1999.
In the end, it's an entirely forgettable experience. It's fun for a while, especially if you're interested in bad Polish games, but not worth any price tag. It isn't as bad as foreign reviews might make you think, but it isn't good either. A shame. A Nazi-controlled future of 2093 sounded interesting.
