Jello Wake

Author's Rating:

Pros: It runs on the Xbox, as promised. Box is a cool green color.

Cons: The gameplay is terrible, the water seems like jello.

The Bottom Line: 
Stay away from this plague ship. Halo has better water and vehicle combat.

Author's Review
Having bad looking water in a game is annoying, but not usually a sin, unless the game is based on water. Which Blood Wake is. You'll realize something is wrong with Blood Wake during the first mission, when you see the "water" undulating on the shore like thick Jello. To top it off, the game has mediocre control, and boring missions.

Essentially a car-combat game (like Twisted Metal) set on water, Blood Wake is really unpleasant to play: The boats don't feel like they're going over water, they feel like they're going over sand, or over soft hills of mashed potatoes. When your boat goes ashore, or flies into the air (which happens extremely frequently), it moves in infuriatingly slow motion until it eventually rights itself.

The control is also irritating. You use the left analog stick to control the boat -- push forward for speed, left for left, and right for right. Sounds good? Now try backing up. If you've ever driven a car, or a boat , you know that you need to push left on the wheel to go right when in reverse. Not in Blood Wake. Here if you want to go left in reverse, you push back and left. In some ways this seems to make sense, but since it's totally counter-intuitive to the way things work in the real world, it just ends up being annoying.

The missions are also pretty dull: All seem to be varieties of "shoot everything." You boat auto-aims, but doesn't account for the rise and fall of the Jello-waves, meaning that most of the gameplay is spent trying to stay on the same horizontal level as your enemies. This is not a very fun thing to do, by the way.

The characters you can see on your boat keep the same, low-poly poses regardless of what's happening in the game. Driving towards a mission? They're sitting tight, waving or looking around. Shooting a baddie? They're sitting tight, waving or looking around. Flipping end over end? They're sitting tight, waving or looking around.

Another major gripe is the inconsistancy of the way the water behaves: sometimes things make wakes, sometimes they don't. Sometimes a big explosion will creat a massive undulating Jello wave, but sometimes it won't. Your wake seems like it's applied on top of the water, not a part of the water -- drive in a circle and you leave a circle of wake texture, not an actual wake that interacts with itself. This kind of effect may have sufficed in Jet Moto on the PSX, but on Xbox we deserve more.

The story is pretty cool, as are the interface elements, but that can't save what's ultimately totally unredeeming gameplay. I really, really wanted to like this game, and I was bitterly dissappointed.

I won't lie to you: this game is only the result of playing about the first three levels. After that I was so disgusted by the game (and my wasting $50 on it) that I just put it away.