This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on April 4th, 2020.
Welcome back to the PlayStation Basement, a weekly review of games for the original PlayStation that are somewhat obscure, unusual, or unknown. Games are rated Good, Bad, or Neutral to emphasize the review itself. Now, let’s go!
The weather in many areas of North America has improved, but the deadly coronavirus has put a damper on spring plans. For fans of video games, this may not be such a huge problem; it’s fun to stay inside and play games, as long as you can remain healthy and virus-free. I thought I had the virus a few weeks ago, and I possibly did. I went to get a test, but they were only testing people who had severe symptoms. I’m sure that’s true for many individuals, so the true spread of the virus is unknown.
Some say that the greatest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown, and here is an unknown game about a virus – Epidemic. Epidemic is the sequel to the previously reviewed Kileak: The DNA Imperative (known as Kileak: The Blood in Japan). Originally released in Japan a few days before the start of 1996 as Kileak: The Blood 2: Reason in Madness, Epidemic arrived in North America on Halloween 1995 and spread to Europe in March of 1997. Continuing where Kileak left off, Epidemic continues the story years later with the player taking on the role of the son of Matt Coda, the main character from the first game. As Masao Coda, you set off for a forbidden area in the underground Neural City, the last home for the human race after the deadly Gigari Virus spread in the wake of the destruction of the South Base in the first game. What begins as a mission to find a cure for Matt’s girlfriend turns into a quest for revenge and justice against the tyrannical Byflos group. Epidemic was published and developed by Sony.
The cover to Epidemic ranges from spooky to sort of surreal. The spooky cover is the Japanese edition showing a dark outline of the Protect Armor piloted by Masao. The armor stands in a dark basement, its eye glowing through the darkness. The American and European covers show an image of the Protect Armor with all kinds of strange images surrounding it. Some of the sights include other characters while there are also images of robots. The Japanese art is pretty good, though the game is not really scary like the first Kileak. The American art is… strange. That’s true of this game too.
Epidemic’s in-game graphics are decent but not amazing. The game is a much more cleaned up version of Kileak with clean textures and polygonal environments. The actual enemies are not that memorable in their designs though. Hordes of small robots await Masao in place of the combination of robots and disgusting mutants in the frigid base under the South Pole. I was disappointed at the lack of horrific creatures. The cutscenes in the game are also kind of odd, often showing some machine walking about or exploding in an otherwise blank environment. The scenes of characters talking are decent, and the intro scenes of each mission do set the tone of going alone into enemy territory. Graphically, Epidemic doesn’t do anything particularly wrong, but it doesn’t leave a lasting impression.
Epidemic sounds like a lot of other first-person shooters. Removing a lot of the eerie loops of found sounds that awaited the player for musick in the first Kileak, Epidemic goes for ambient, environmental effects with only hints of what came before. The sound effects include all the gunfire you can imagine, and there are numerous voice clips in the game as well. Voices are all passable but none are particularly well done like Doctor Kim in Kileak. Epidemic seems to have swept clean the idiosyncrasies that came before.
The gameplay commits similar transgressions. Epidemic is a first-person shooter. Kileak was a first-person shooter that played more like a scary, dungeon-crawling game about survival. Though that surprised me about Kileak, I really liked that blend of things. It was a game that required precision, stealth, and conservation of resources to make it through. None of that is here. Epidemic is a straight forward first-person shooter. There’s nothing to hide from here; it’s full-speed ahead and all guns blazing! Thankfully, your Protect Armor is easy to control through all of this action, but I miss the careful movements I had to make in the earlier title.
Epidemic does do some things well. For one, controlling the Protect Armor really feels like piloting a small mecha suit (Armored Trooper VOTOMS size). You have a health bar, a shield bar, and a supply of special energy to use, all of which can be filled by different pickups or areas. The armor itself does not move particularly fast, at least early on, and the weapons are all built-in with add-ons to be made. You have a recharging but weak laser, a machine gun, and missiles. There are a large number of different types of missiles to find in the different levels. Whether you find missiles or powerups, you can take these items onward into the next mission, so exploration is generally a good idea. Unfortunately, this comes with some issues too.
The issues I have with Epidemic are not the worst things ever, but they are impactful enough to hinder my enjoyment of the title. The slow movement of the Protect Armor is a bit slow with this being more of an action game. It’s especially annoying trying to fill in the whole map for each room, as only the parts you step on or are adjacent to will fill in. This means walking around each room to make sure it all gets mapped for future reference. Enemies, already numerous, reemerge from small passages on the map to fight the player over and over again. Though they aren’t hard, this is annoying. Items also drop with each enemy that is felled, so it’s really not difficult to restock supplies. Moving ahead can be a chore at times, since the game throws numerous puzzles at you. These puzzles are not particularly interesting, sometimes being the late 90s variety of pushing a switch and rushing through a door or navigating a labyrinth and making sure the correct switches are pushed the correct ways. It’s just kind of tedious. My big problem with this game is that it lacks the horror elements of the first game. The story also shifts into something much more generic than what it appears to be at the start. I haven’t entirely finished the game yet, so there is a chance that something truly terrifying happens at the end. It hasn’t been amazingly engaging getting there though.
Epidemic is a first-person shooter. That’s really the best way to describe this title. Going from a weird amalgam of related genres to something sleeker and more action-packed wasn’t the best move for this game. Epidemic perhaps predicted the spread of the first-person shooter outbreak in later generations of consoles. It’s really not a bad game, but it’s nothing that amazing either. Epidemic is no super bug, nor is it a cure.
Epidemic receives a Neutral.
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