Reviews

Back Track

By Jorden

First Person Shooters have got to be my favorite Genre of all time and it's about time a new portable one was released... of wait did I say new?

Story: 8

You are Jim Track and you've been sent to a secret military base on the dark side of the moon (project BSBODSOM - build secret base on dark side of moon - Imaginative huh?). Anyway the evil alien being Domingoaniax has taken over the base and is assimilating humans in with his cyborg armies. Soon he will use these humans to wage war against other humans of earth... sounds somewhat cheesie to me but bonus marks givin for taking up 6 pages of the instruction booklet (hell that's longer than both Grand Theft Auto books combined!)

Graphics: 6

Not bad but not so good either... everything fades off into the distance so unless you're near a wall there is a nice black patch in the middle of the screen. This is really annoying when you are trying to shoot an enemy and he moves "out of your range"... Sometimes the enemies appear pixilated as well, which doesn't help much. Also some items at time appear to blend in with the ground.

Game Play: 8

This is one of the shining moments of this game... Remember Wolfenstien 3d? Yeah me neither. J/k this game plays almost exactly like the original first person shooters (oh wait it's a PC port of an original shooter - link at bottom of review). The single player mode is somewhat lacking some content but is still not bad as an overall package. You start off at the entrance (and the only exit) to the moon base. As you wonder around battling everything from assimilated humans, to cyborgs, and ghosts you'll sometimes find tubes with people in them. You'll need to teleport these 110 brave victims back to the home planet to successfully beat the game.

Controls are simplistic for a simplistic game. L+R are your respective strafe buttons (thank god), the A button fires, opens doors, and rescues humans (gun drops so you don't waste ammo), B rotates through your weapons, Start pulls up your map (not an automap though), and select pulls up the load/save/options screen.

Multiplayer is something I haven't had the chance to try against a human opponent yet but there is a really decent single player deathmatch experience. In Back Track you select one of 5 characters, but here's the twist each character has 1 and only 1 weapon, and you can't pick up new ones. So if you run out of ammo just run to a handy terminal and switch characters to something that has a little more plentiful ammo. First to 20 frags (kills to the FPS newbie) wins the match. There is also another mode called Matrix Assault. The goal of matrix Assault is to score 4 frags with each of the 5 characters (20 frags total). If you score more than the 4 frags 1 frag gets randomly removed from any character you've used.

Sound: 5

Ugh not very good here. There is some good background music and some sounds from the characters but the best sound is the sound of the guns and even that isn't very good. Sometimes the sound becomes staticty. One plus is if you're annoyed by the music, is it can be switched off in the options menu or by pressing select during the game.

Lasting Value: 7

Multiple single player levels (that you must play through twice. once on your way in and again out. Enemies stay dead though), Six multiplayer levels (2 DM Modes), and the ability to save anywhere make this a fairly good lasting game (or at least until Doom is released). Multiple carts are unfortunately needed for multiplayer.

Bottom Line

If you like old school first person shooters this game should be right up your alley. Everything is on one level (i.e. no stairs or cliffs to snipe from), corners can only bend at 90 degrees (making pretty simplistic levels), and a total of 9 weapons ranging from a swiss army knife, to a bubble gun, to a vacuum cleaner, to your typical machine gun.

Click here to visit happy puppy to download the demo of the PC version of Back Track!

Final Score: 7 out of 10

Back Track is rated T for Teen by the ESRB with a warning of violence.