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Nightmare Creatures 2 Review
Jon Lenaway
00/12/0000
Nightmare, it certainly is...
Nightmare Creatures 2 is an eerie hack-n-slash game with quite a variety of fiendish enemies, squirting blood, foreboding scenery, creepy sounds, and special items. It doesnât sound half-bad, does it? Well, keep reading. The Dreamcast version of the game seems like little more than a port of the PlayStation game of the same name. The resolution and animation are improved, but even some of the limitations of the PlayStationâs hardware come through on the Dreamcast (pixilated textures and warping).
Nightmare Creatures 2 really does little to expand the boundaries of gameplay. You progress from room to room while hacking up creatures. Now and then, you come across a locked door for which you must find the key. Running straight ahead creates a distraction because the animation seems to jitter as your main character moves. The variety in fighting combos does little to liven up the pace of the game. Most enemies take a little too long to kill, and you will find yourself falling asleep as you hack down their life bars a drip at a time.
Also added to the game this time around is an option to perform a fatality on your opponent. Fatalities differ only by creature, and you always use the same button combination to perform them. They are actually good fun the first few times you see them, but more variety would have kept these sequences from getting as tired.
Take the PlayStation version of the game, bump up the resolution a bit, smooth out the textures, and âvoila!â you have a Dreamcast game. Pixilated textures? Check. Limited sight distance? Check. Low polygon counts in the characters? Check. Clipping issues (when your character magically passes through walls and objects)? Check.
Honestly if you look past some of the gameâs shortcomings and glitches, there are some impressive character designs. Some of the characters even remind me of the work of H.R. Giger.
Looking at a PlayStation game, you might be fairly impressed with the graphics while admitting the PlayStation is showing its age. Seeing this level of quality in Dreamcast graphics, however, is disappointing.
The sounds of Nightmare Creatures 2 are actually done really well. Realistically creepy sound effects are spread throughout the game in the form of breaking glass, moaning monsters, chopping bodies with your axe, and all sorts of ambient noises.
In a recent issue of Game Developer Magazine, Derek Sanderson of Origin (Ultima Worlds Online) gets up on the soapbox to discuss design elements that remind a player they are indeed playing a game. Sanderson claims that details such as bad voice acting, typos or other small errors can âcollectively break the sense of immersion, pulling players out of the enviroment and reminding them that they are only playing a game.â Games, like books or movies, try to draw the player into this new world and make them forget where they really are. Details such as jittery animation, poor clipping, game freezes, etc. can certainly remind a player they are still playing a game and Nightmare Creatures 2 does this a bit too often. The game has actually froze twice on me during play, and even crashed once (See the crash screen pic.)
Further bug-testing, more gameplay tweaking, better Dreamcast enhancements and more stable code could have made this game much better.
