Review: Run Like Hell for the Xbox

RLH (Run Like Hell) has a name to die for. It's a shame the game doesn't back it up. It's not that it's a bad game in the way that Starship Troopersis a bad movie. It doesn't break the barriers of badness and achieve a kind of goodness, a kind of camp appeal. It's somewhere between pretty decent and horrible, in a land of comfortable mediocrity. RLH truly has an "empty smile and a hungry heart," as the song for which it's probably not named goes.

RLH is intended as one of those space-survival horror games/setups, where Evil Aliens have gotten aboard the space station and the main character and a few others are the only humans remaining. It could be charitably dubbed a "corridor-shooter" although, to be fair, there are rooms and stuff to go in and there are crates lying around. Since it's sci-fi and since it's a video game, RLH takes place in that strange world where Ph.D.s not only have breasts the size of ripe cantaloupes, they also have muscles the size of hams, not to mention obnoxious voice acting. Somewhere in between the plastic surgery and exercise, they managed to pick up a Ph.D. Also, females who have the cojones to make a rank like Commander will squeal like little girls and become very frightened when confronted with looming danger or the hint that danger might possibly be looming at some point. Mind-boggling.

And it does not shy from the clichés, oh no, the Complete Guide to Shooter Clicheswas getting thin five minutes into the first level. After the tutorial, the game begins with one of those lame running things where the character runs towards the screen and players have a split-second decision to dodge, jump, or duck, or the evil alien catches up to them and eats their head. Well, not exactly "eats their head," more "the character falls down in a fashion to indicate 'dead'." Isn't "Don't Kill Your Players In The First Five Minutes?" taught in Game Design 101?

From there, we move to dim corridors filled with green light and flashing sparks, like in a k00l d3wd's first Quake IIlevel. In the future, apparently, it is easy being green. Moving on, not only do they break out the "find the keycard"-which was dangerously clichéd in Doom-"puzzle," they also throw in the "run around and find chunks of a combination to open the door" motif, followed by a heaping helping of door puzzles. That's right, door puzzles. The main character finds a maintenance panel and just beyond is a corridor with four doors on it. Rather than making the panels easy to use, say put a button that says "Open/Close Door #1", these panels require using them all in some kind of order to open the doors one at a time. Then the bad things inside must be slain, another chunk of the combination retained, lather, rinse, repeat. All this is going on so that the main character can find a crowbar to open another door. Once he actually acquires said crowbar, he has to journey back to the door that's jammed-because the 800 pounds of weapons he's carrying couldn't break a lock or anything-whereupon he and another character have to pry open the door. Oh, but it's not that simple, since RLH uses a "press the button rapidly while the two guys see-saw on the crowbar in hilarious fashion, hoping the big, mean monster doesn't get them!" system reminiscent of the Boost system in Final Fantasy VIII only, you know, stupider.

It is good to know that in the future, doors are untrustworthy things quite unlike the portals we use today. They are, as Gollum might say, "tricksy hobbits." Also, man can apparently launch a space station, but hasn't come up with anything like biometric scanning that can replace keys, keycards, and secret combinations.

The rest is pretty much the same door/key/combination hunt with a few running-type "puzzles" thrown in when we're in danger of running out of clichés. Important things are marked with floating yellow exclamation points, so it quickly becomes the Great Exclamation Mark Hunt. RLH attempts survival-horror, but feels more like a fun house where guys in masks pop out yelling "Booga Booga Booga!" While the AI is pretty decent, the enemies lack the personality of Halo's baddies and the variations on the super-cool-evil-whatever theme have been done to death.

Animation issues crop up here and there, too. Models have a visible lurch when shifting from walk to run and the main character runs like a dork. And he also kicks in quite girly fashion. If you're going to go for the macho testosterone feel, make sure your macho military dude doesn't run like a dork and kick like a girl. Visually, it's a bland palette from the Standard Shooter set, lots of darks and greens and so on. Product placement is a requirement, so the BAWLS machines are all over the place and dispense health-replenishing beverages. Nice to know our corporate overlords' vending machines will be safe while aliens are rampaging through the station and killing the crew. And there's nothing quite like sneaking through a dark corridor and seeing BAWLS come flashing out. That's teh hardcore, alright.

Sound levels are all over the map. Normal TV volume makes the voices impossible to pick out while computers speaking and massive doors swinging open are turned up to eleven. The music's alright, some pseudo-John Williams with a dash of nu-metal mixed in, but nothing to write home about. The aliens sound like Creepy Aliens From Outer Space, the usual. A soundtrack album is included, which is a nice touch, but the band is the usual bunch of white guys trying to look tough.

Weapons can be modified with powerups that increase damage and so on, which is a nifty touch, but that's not enough to save another ordinary SF space shooter. XBox Live has some skins and such, but there's no multiplayer worth mentioning and single player is just another boring slog through The Land of Misfit Doors. I'd like to use some "Run Like Hell...away from this game!" line that critics slave over for weeks, but it's not a story of badness, it's a story of mediocrity.