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CNET editors' rating:
3.0 stars
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Product summary
Insecticide can't decide whether it wants to be an adventure or a platformer, so it does neither particularly well.
Specifications: ESRB: Everyone 10 and older; Genre: Adventure; Number of players: 1 Player See full specs
Gamespot editors' review
- Reviewed on: 07/02/2008
- Released on: 06/13/2008
Insecticide isn't a straightforward adventure as much as it is an adventure and a 3D platformer pushed together with little care as to how the parts fit. Many of the platform action sequences are dull, repetitive, and seem to have been shoehorned in at the last minute to jazz up what would have otherwise been a traditional point-and-click adventure. So the end result is a haphazard mishmash that won't appeal to fans of either genre.
Meet Chrys Liszt, cop on the bug beat.
You play Chrys Liszt, a rookie detective working with her rather Sipowiczian senior partner, a cockroach named Roachy Caruthers, on investigating a homicide--er, insecticide--at the famous Nectarola soft drink plant. The plot is a cutesy, offbeat take on film noir with bugs playing all the key roles, like a combo of '70s TV cop shows, A Bug's Life, and Planet of the Apes. It's the far future city of Troi where the world has been taken over by insects, which have evolved in the wake of what seems to have been a nuclear war. Cockroaches and their buggy brethren now run the show, while mankind has been shoved aside to live as dimwitted hominids who are little better than third-class citizens. This bug world isn't a whole lot different from our own, however. Insects may have survived nukes, but they have the same problem with crime that we do and the same grizzled, seen-it-all-before cops out there trying to deal with it. You've seen it all before in dozens of crime movies and TV shows, albeit not with bugs in place of the usual human stars.
At least the writers do a good job of sending up this noir setting. Insecticide is loaded with puns, inside jokes, and references to old sci-fi shows. The goofiness is so broad that you can readily tell that the lineage of the game goes back to the days when LucasArts was making the adventures that all the cool kids wanted to play. Much of the dialogue is balanced between appealing to kids and adults. References to the "wingless protection program," lines like "Don't be a pupa," and all the characters with buggy cop names like Silverfishberg or McMantis mean that you'll alternate between giggling and groaning, depending on your age. Lines themselves aren't typically all that funny, and everything is sold more as a broad satire than a pure comedy. Nevertheless, the whole presentation is handled with such cheer and the voice acting is done with such a perfect Saturday-morning cartoon bite that you won't much care.
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