Farscape: The Game (PC)

Reviewed by

Tom Chick

on 09/10/2002

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Page 2

For such a combat-oriented game, Farscape makes poor use of its characters. The most likely candidates for combat, the warrior D'Argo and the commando Aeryn, don't come into the game until the end, and even then their appearances are little more than cameos. At least D'Argo is presented with his whip tongue and Qualta blade. Although Rygel has thrown bombs and drawn blood in the TV show, for some reason he isn't allowed to use a weapon in the game. You'll have to replay a lot of missions because his lack of speed and defenses gets him killed. The main candidate for pacifism in the fiction of Farscape is the blue, bald, and buxom priestess Zhaan. However, except for one instance in which she insists on trying to negotiate, she spends the game blithely blasting the living daylights out of anything that moves.

Farscape has some interesting textures and color schemes. There's even an occasional sporting try at interesting geometry. But the game's blocky, low-polygon graphics and stiff animation make the game look extremely dated. The game's collision detection is extremely poor, so the combat looks bad. The special effects look like rehashed effects from a thousand other games. Because the camera wanders all over the place, objects and walls turn transparent with alarming frequency. The sound consists of workaday engine humming, gun zapping, and combatant grunting, with the show's distinctive soundtrack playing in the background.

Farscape's graphics engine adequately presents the aforementioned stereotypical alien planet, which looks like almost every other alien planet since Half-Life's Xen. But it's really disappointing when it tries to re-create the TV show's unique production design. When the game finally goes on board the Moya, you'll find that it bears no resemblance to Rick Eyres' distinctive design (with the possible exception of a glimpse of Pilot's station). Instead, you mostly see murky textures, blocky corridors, a few consoles, some crates, and some barrels.

Farscape really doesn't do justice to the original TV show, which is disappointing, since the developer clearly had some idea of what the show is about. The game gets a lot of mileage out of the fact that Rygel hates being sent into small spaces because of his size. The game even shows the basics of how Crichton interacts with his alien friends. The snippets of dialogue (gamely recorded by the actual cast) provide an inkling of Farscape's main appeal, namely the interaction among the characters. But the game, and its slavish emphasis on shooting stuff, serves as a horrible showcase for any sort of character interaction. It offers no insight into the rich universe of the TV show and does nothing to reproduce the sense of watching an episode of Farscape. Ultimately, this game feels exactly like what it is: a throwaway licensing opportunity that really should have been thrown away.