Graphics

The graphical presentation is hampered by the same inconsistency. What the engine can actually produce, from a technical standpoint, is very impressive and puts it on par with anything I have seen. Developed in-house by Kylotonn and called the Kt Engine, it supports a dizzying array of features. If you have the hardware to take advantage of it, you will see bump mapping, dynamic shadows, and specular lighting through its use of Vertex Shader 1.4 and Pixel Shader 2.0. Also in the Kt Engine is the latest version of the NovodeX physics engine, which allows B.O.S. to be the first game capable of taking advantage machines using Ageia’s PhysX processor.

All technically incredible, but ultimately the capabilities of the engine were not exploited by the devs. Yes, smoke and particle effects looked incredible and the fire of gas canisters propelling them around rooms and knocking off boxes was great, but the lack of diversity in the environments takes so much away from that. Similarly, characters in the game that look stunning in terms of detail, quickly help you back to reality when the scripting has them walking and moving like marionettes.

In the end, the biggest crime here is not that Nolan Daneworth’s wife and dog were killed, or his house razed before he got amnesia, it is that the bugs and lack of polish bring down what could have been a pretty great multiplayer game. It has six classes such as sniper, engineer, and grenadier, similar to Team Fortress; it features up to 32 players on a server, and allows the unique mechanic of betting on your own games and success. Actually, for those willing to overlook the crashes and install problems or the weaknesses of the single player campaign, you won’t find much of the bad voice acting or strange character animations in the multiplayer component, and you may enjoy it. But as of press time, we can barely find anyone playing it, and multiplayer games without a multitude of players don’t last long.

The game begins with narration saying, “For thousands of years money has been the root of all evil, now it is the root of all survival.” That might turn out to be truer than the game’s developers and publishers may have hoped. Perhaps the publisher weighed its success against the soon-to-be-released 800 lb. gorillas of the holiday season and decided to push it out before it was ready for financial reasons? At least that is the scenario I would place my money on. The intro’s narration goes on to say that “In the future, there is no second prize.” For most cash-strapped gamers, that is definitely true, and with a season coming up with games Like Star Wars: Battlefront II and Quake IV, you would be wise to hold on to your chips for now.


That is unless you really enjoy alternating periods of excitement and extreme frustration. That is after all, what gambling is all about, right?