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CNET editors' rating:
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Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 09/10/2002
- Released on: 08/08/2002
- Originally published on GameSpot: Farscape: The Game (PC) Review
The Sci-Fi Channel's successful series Farscape is currently in its fourth season and has built up a loyal fan following. The ongoing story of a band of escaped prisoners in a pregnant space whale named Moya is similar enough to Star Trek to be familiar--it's your standard intergalactic potpourri of characters traipsing from one adventure to another. But under the creative guidance of the Jim Henson Company, it has enough of an exotic rogue element to feel fresh, with advanced puppetry, elaborate makeup effects, distinctive production design, some controversial ongoing story arcs, and lots of Australian accents. You'd think someone would be able to make a pretty interesting game using this license. Unfortunately, you'd be wrong. Instead of drawing from the rich source material of the TV show, Farscape is a conventional action game with a clunky interface and a dated engine.
My name's John Crichton, and I'm trapped in a bad game.
The game jumps right into the Farscape universe without so much as a "how do you do." Start the game and suddenly you're watching a barely comprehensible cutscene in which some people fly out of a spaceship and crash-land on a planet. Then you're at the scene of the landing, where some guy is calling some blue girl "Pip." They're engaging in witty repartee as if they'd known each other for years, but if you're not a fan of the show, you may have no idea who they are. Before you know it, you're being hit on all sides with references to Aeryn's Prowler, DRDs, Pilot, the Nebari, the Authority, and Moya's baby. These references are great for fans of the show, but they'll probably leave everyone else at least a bit confused.
The game's story is divided into acts, which are further divided into missions for one to three of the show's characters. Your first several missions are, as you might have guessed, to get parts to repair your ship. Then you run around and undertake more quests, one of which involves investigating a forest. Literally. You find a forest, you investigate it. The game ends with (you may have seen something like this in about a billion other sci-fi movies and TV shows) overheating a reactor to blow up a base, which basically means that you walk around to different consoles while a Klaxon blares half-heartedly in the background.
Farscape's gameplay is really basic. You control one character, and the computer controls everyone else. Your job is basically to shoot stuff while following a purple arrow that guides you to your next goal, whether it's another character, a key, an exit, a forest that needs investigating, or whatever. There are two half-baked attempts at stealth missions, as well as a few instances when characters have to separate to solve some painfully obvious puzzle, but these slight changes of pace provide no consolation.
Farscape's combat interface is clunky at best. There's an automatic tracking system that locks on to enemies for you, so your job is basically to hold down the fire button. You can move around while you're shooting, but if you do, you're just going to confuse everything. The health system is like Halo's, in which characters sustain damage to an automatically replenishing "vitality" before losing actual hit points. This means that you can save your med kits by resting up between battles. It's a good idea in theory, but in Farscape, it means there's a fair amount of waiting around. The small variety of weapons is distinguished mainly by what type of damage they do. Different weapons cause different amounts of damage to different enemies, but Farscape's inventory system makes it all but impossible to swap weapons around on the fly. Ammo is limited, which leads to some really tedious situations in which you'll have to run back and forth selling the stuff you've gathered to replenish your ammo. It's a bit like Diablo, in which you had to constantly run back to town to sell your loot. Farscape's inventory system is like that, but in a bad game.
Your typical alien planet.
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