Enough of all these realistic wannabe shooters or strategy games, attempting to create realistic events. With Abomination you know exactly where you stand. It’s your paramilitary superelite armed-to-the-teeth squad vs. every goddamn evil thing the creators could think of. As you can judge pretty quickly from some of the adjoining screenshots, Abomination is set in a city with a major growth problem. Faithful religious freaks, weird looking bio-organisms, and some serious population-diminishing odd weeds littering the street. Your objective is to scratch out as many baddies as possible and put a stop to the complete rampage of these hordes of brain-dead mutant “Brood” warrior things. The game is very clear and simple like that; the pity is that this simplicity seems to extend an awful lot further.

In true X-Com style, you get your team members which you can equip with whatever you want. There's quite a list of weapons to choose from, most of them the realistic type, though after a while you start going into rail cannons and that sort of stuff. One little gripe here is that setting up the equipment is rather annoying to navigate, as you have one skimpy little bar, and you have to scroll it left and right to choose your weapons, and the only way to see a weapons statistic is to leave the equipment menu, open the document folder, flick to the equipment section, and click on the appropriate item to see its stats. Then you hop over to the map, and you can select your first “incident” area to enter. You enter the area, receive some completely worthless briefing which always starts with “blahblah Brood rampaging around blahblah ack very very bad blahblah” and basically telling you to go blow everything up. This is due to the fact that Abomination randomly makes missions. What this means is that every game of Abomination is different; what it also means is that most of the game seems rather repetitive. After a few dozen missions, the tilesets become rather familiar, but somehow, even though seeming familiar, it never really gets annoying that you keep repeating these tilesets. Though they have tried to insert mission objectives in all these missions, it has sadly rather failed and only boils down to “if it moves, kill it”. There are about two or three objectives that do make a little difference, the most disappointing one being the “assassinate” objective. This sounds an awful lot of fun, and visions of a stealth sniper blowing up a target come to mind. It’s a pity then that the only real practical way of doing it is just taking your biggest guy, arming him with a Jackhammer or something equally forceful, wading through the crowd of brood baddies, walking up to the unsuspecting mindbogginlgy imbecilic stupid target, shoot him, and wade back to your car. The other up (or down) side of this random mission generator is that you can have many, many missions. After about 40 missions, the game is sort of getting difficult at times, but there is still no real serious resistance.

Abomination does not really try to be very “tactical” in a big way. It is true you get to equip agents and distribute experience points among them (nice touch), take them through all missions using the crucial pause button to assess the situation and give out new orders, but as far as freedom of movement comes, it ends about there. At the flat red satellite map, you have no choices to try and perhaps cleanse areas under brood influence, only to enter incident areas, or perhaps temples or brood hideouts (after the FBI has found these out for you). So you have no choice in missions, you have to do what you are given, and the combat is also hardly challenging stuff to keep the tactician’s mind from falling asleep. The sheer strategic force required of pausing to click on the next target is not very riveting stuff, though there can be more challenging situations of attempting to grenade very fast running mean looking baddies quickly, or to grab that damn rocket launcher off your guy (which they always insist on having out as a preference when in their inventory) before he starts shooting those rockets up your guy’s ass.

The AI settings available for your soldiers are all rather useless, one has them running off everywhere across the map getting shot to bits, and the other has them cowering away yelling for mommy to come help while getting shot to bits. The only real way of getting things right is to do it yourself. As some of your characters have gained experience, they gain the ability to do little rolls and all to avoid gunfire..*cough*..supposedly. It looks incredibly foolish after a confrontation, when my two elite military dudes start rolling and strafing about the place for no apparent reason, and is only annoying when they do it during a combat situation when you would rather have them taking out bad guys instead of being engaged in useless gymnastic exercises.

Now I’ve raved an awful lot about the bad points here, but that’s just because bad points are much easier to remember and explain than the overall good feeling this game has, because apart from all this complaining I’ve just done, most missions are a damn lot of fun to complete. And that’s what counts ladies and gentlemen, the insane amount of fun that can be had from arming guys to the teeth, sending them out onto randomly generated streets and blowing the complete %*#!@# out of any kebab zombie broodling bad guys that care to get nasty with you. The only pity is that all this mind-blowing fun can’t seem to be had very easily in multiplayer. Playing against each other with squads is rather unsatisfying, and playing together in a campaign (each controlling two characters of the four man squad) is also blown by the fact that the crucial pause button cannot be used. Kudos to Hothouse though for trying, as there’s a stack of options for multiplayer, and if you’re with at least more than 2 people there could be a stack of fun to be had there, though Abomination must be understood to be mainly a singleplayer only campaign experience.

As an overall description, Abomination could be called a simplified X-Com. Which is a bit of a downer for any real X-Com fan, but good news for all those who weren’t really sure of X-Com. The campaign goes on for quite a while with dozens of short killing frenzy missions, with some slight changes every dozen or so missions. Weapons gradually upgrade, characters gain experience, bigger bad guys, you know the stuff. Its simple, it’s very much to the point, and it’s fun.

Highs