Boiling Point: Road to Hell Review

Ambitious PC games rarely come without a host of problems. Boiling Point, a fusion of first-person shooter and role-playing game, is no exception to that rule, shipping with so many issues that it's unplayable out of the box. The Deep Shadows-developed game is crazy buggy, with frequent crashes, routine corruption of save files, vanishing non-player characters that makes it impossible to complete quests, and lots of other extreme weirdness, including the ability to destroy a police station with a single crossbow bolt. A recent patch eliminates the save bug and most of the quest and graphical oddities, but at present this game remains proudly unrefined.

The jungle scenery is beautiful, but you need one powerful machine to see it at its best.

So, caveat emptor. Keep in mind that this is for all intents and purposes a beta, even with the patch. You'll experience crashes, watch NPCs open and drink from invisible cans, encounter traffic pileups because the artificial intelligence drives worse than a fleet of little old ladies, and so forth. But with that said, Boiling Point is still an engaging play because there is nothing even remotely like it on the market. Deep Shadows has worked off the Grand Theft Auto template to fashion an open-ended hybrid shooter with more diverse missions and a more interesting setting than the genre has seen in years. While the plot is so derivative that it must power a dozen action movies--you play as Saul Meyers, a former French Legionnaire investigating the disappearance of his reporter daughter Lisa from a fictional South American nation called Realia--the design goes beyond ripping off Arnold Schwarzenegger's Commando and Crytek's Far Cry. Basically, this is Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in the jungle, maybe with a dash of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind tossed in for good measure. Starting from the hub village of Puerto Somba, you take a roundabout path of looking for your girl that involves signing up for jobs doled out by the local bus station, government, mafia, guerrillas, CIA agents, bandits, and indigenous groups and trekking into the jungles in search of adventure and ways to make some cash.

Money is the main driving force here, because everybody has his hand out in this stereotypically corrupt banana republic. To get tips about Lisa's disappearance, you need to shell out 1,200 pesos here, 20,000 pesos there, and so on. Accepting these mercenary assignments typically comes at a nonmonetary cost, though, as faction members tend to remember the French commando who just killed a bunch of their buddies. Do thug work for the corrupt police force, and you'll make friends with the government at the expense of your relationship with the guerrillas and the bandits. Reverse your tactics and you'll sacrifice government goodwill to chum up to the communists and the crooks.

This means that you can't keep everybody happy. It also means that you probably won't be able to complete all of the available missions in a single run-through of the game, which enhances its replay value. That's a good thing, in part because there is no multiplayer option, but at the same time Boiling Point takes the factionalism too far. Accidentally shoot a civilian, for instance, and you become a walking target. Hunched-over grannies you were recently helping cross the street start tossing grenades, and average citizens suddenly become assassins. Every stroll down the street turns into a scene from The Wild Bunch. This constant harassment gets annoying in short order and dramatically ups the difficulty of missions, as you can find yourself flanked by Grandma Dynamite and her pistol-packing neighbors when attacking a guerrilla truck or a bandit drug lab.

Pitched battles aren't handled very well by the game engine either. Imprecise controls are exasperating at times, with everything feeling a little bit off. Movement and aiming are never quite fluid, although things get better as the game goes on and you improve both the quality of your weapons and Meyers' core stats, which govern his skills with automatic weapons, pistols, and the like. Enemies seem to be able to outrun bullets, so it's difficult to line them up as they zip between attacking in the open and taking cover. Also, even bare-chested thugs can take a good six or seven rounds before going down, so you can waste whole clips on single foes. Ammo is in cheap supply at the local arms dealer and, oddly enough, roadside fruit stands, but managing your shots is still vital, since it's easy to run out of bullets in the middle of firefights with these Speedy Gonzales characters. Equipment also degrades, so you have to keep guns repaired or risk firing duds in the middle of a melee.

Although the game structure may feel remarkably GTA-like, most of the action is standard shooter fare with high body counts.

Driving controls are another cause for complaint. Although including the ability to tool around in cars, choppers, tanks, and boats adds depth to Saul's South American adventure (though having to fill up with gas is a touch too much reality), Deep Shadows has done a lousy job with the mechanics. Driving a car, for example, is so touchy that it takes a good half hour of touring around town streets before you can maneuver around a simple corner without sideswiping a streetlight, let alone navigating the twisty dirt roads in the countryside. Better vehicles with improved handling are available as you progress through the game, although the controls are never more than tolerable. For what it's worth, the NPC drivers seem to have the same problem, judging by the number of times you come across them stuck on posts and walls.