Purge (demo)

Fighter: A proud member of the “we hate technology, we prefer to kill people by hitting them with heavy things” society, the Fighter shuns The Order’s futuristic weapons in favor of the more simplistic weapons employed by “The Chosen.” He is a living testament to the strength of the human spirit, the courage humans can show when defending their comrades, and how fucking stupid it is to charge into a battlefield where bullets and explosives are flying while armed with a little pointy club.

Weapons: His primary weapon is the aforementioned little pointy club. I suppose it’s a pretty powerful melee weapon, but I never got to see how powerful it was because the fighter is incredibly slow and by the time you lug your Buick-sized ass over to an enemy, he will already have spotted you and filled your body with bullets or lasers or possibly a combination of both. He also has a remarkably slow and useless ranged attack, and I have no idea how much damage it does because I don’t think I ever landed a hit with it.

Spawning inside another player sure is neat!

Assassin: I’ve beaten the first few levels of Tenchu: Stealth Assassins for the Playstation, so I’m widely considered a seasoned veteran in the art of assassination. The art of assassination typically involves taking something sharp and sticking it into an unsuspecting person many times until they fall over and die, and it’s an art the Assassin in Purge really really sucks at.

Weapons: His melee weapon is a set of claws attached to his hand. That almost sounds like a cool weapon, but the developers didn’t bother to redo any of the animations for his attacks, so his hand attack looks just like everybody else’s. This means that instead of punching forward with his claws he just does a wimpy little sideways open-handed slap, which for some reason looks really funny when he’s wearing claws and trying to kill someone with this attack.

The graphics in this game were horrendous enough to make my eyes turn around in their sockets and burrow backwards into my skull to escape the glow of the monitor. I’m afraid if I boot up Purge again my eyes will spontaneously detonate and sever my brain stem, which will at least give me a handy excuse when people question me about my complete lack of both writing ability and ability in general. The same ugly grass texture is repeated approximately 42 times per square inch in the demo map, but that’s okay because if the side of a hill happens to be facing away from a light source, every once in a while it will decide it really doesn’t need a texture anymore and will simply turn black. All human skin in the game looks like it’s made of carrot peels, and most of the gun models look like they were made by opening up Maya and copying and pasting random metallic shapes next to each other for half an hour. There is a massive amount of slowdown whenever the game needs to render complex shapes, such as “yellow lines” and “yellow lines that go in a slightly different direction from those other yellow lines.”

Uh...

The gameplay is your standard team deathmatch crap, the only difference being that you have to attack the enemy “portal”, and if you can reduce it to zero hit points your team wins. However, I’d be lying if I said the game wasn’t interesting. There are some wonderful bugs that managed to work their way into the demo, since apparently the Purge coders wrote the game by copying down random lines of code from various programming books and then arranging them in a big text file in alphabetical order.

Regardless of ping, players will sometimes start warping to random locations within a 10-foot area, usually while strafing
Players sometimes spawn inside each other
When walking along a hillside, you’ll occasionally stick in a certain spot for no apparent reason. You have to jump to unstick yourself, but then if you walk over that location again it won’t be sticky anymore.
Every so often, my attempts to start the game up would be met with this error message
Near bases, you will occasionally run into invisible walls
The walls in the demo map have barbed wire on them, but the mapper was too lazy to put damage entities around it, so you can walk across it with impunity. This isn’t really a bug, but I decided to list it here because I’m a pathological liar.

There really isn’t too much else to say. I suppose I can’t claim to have been ripped off since it was a free demo, but I still feel like I’ve been robbed of valuable time that I could have spent doing fun and wonderful things like not playing Purge. I’m also sad that so many Freeform Interactive employees wasted their time making this game, when they could have spent that time enjoying their favorite pastimes, such as eating checker pieces and writing misspelled haikus on their own foreheads with magic markers. But that time is already wasted – this review exists to prevent you all from wasting your time in a similar fashion. If you ever get an urge to play this game, suppress it immediately and try taking up a less painful hobby, like baseball bat-assisted suicide.

Each category in the rating system is based out of a possible -10 score (-10 being the worst). The overall score is based out of a possible -50 score (-50 being the worst).

– Taylor "Psychosis" Bell