Gameplay

More Fun Than a Barrel of Monkeys

KISS isn't the engrossing puzzle-fest that was Half-Life. It isn't the epic story of Wheel of Time. Along with Serious Sam, it might be the closest thing we now have to DOOM. You kill things. Lots of them. They spawn in all around you sometimes, other times you open the door and make a full-speed retreat to get some distance between yourself and the horde after you so you can use an area-effect weapon without killing yourself. The monsters are simple - they have almost stereotypical, one-dimensional defining characteristics. Headless are mindless things that swarm you and try to take you down by force of numbers. Blade Masters throw homing blades at you, usually while you're distracted by something else. Unipsychos have a lethal fire attack that you want to stay the hell away from.

Spiked shoulderpads

Sword swipe flash

Third Law has created some awesome encounters by using combinations of these beasts. There are no fancy puzzles and interesting plot to lead you on. All you want is your next weapon and armor piece so you can fight better against the newer, bigger monsters. One of the coolest things is that no critter ever seems to become obsolete. You'll see Headless on the first level of your episode and as late as the stage before the boss.

Fire Your Guns

There are 12 weapons in the game, though any given character can only use 6. There are 4 general weapons and 2 character specific ones. The character specific ones are always a melee weapon and the best weapon for the character. All are balanced, whether by situation or by ammunition. It's stupid to use the whip (basically a weaker but slightly faster railgun) against a swarm, but they're great for picking off floating gasbags. Melee weapons have their uses too - they're great at taking out Headless so you don't waste ammunition, or any single, tough creature (except the Unipsycho.)

Unreal Colored Lighting!

Unreal Cathedral

Eat My Element!

There are problems with the gameplay, however. First, it's extremely linear. We didn't really care that much since it was executed well, but for those who want freedom a-la Thief or Deus Ex, you're going to be disappointed. Second is that you start over 4 times in the game. For each character you have to get his stuff and fight through "early" stages of the game before moving on. Once you're done, you're done. The part that makes this bearable is that the bosses are all excellent. They are some of the coolest critters seen outside Doom and Duke Nukem 3D.

No more Unreal jokes, I promise

Oh yes! De-limbed!

Multiplayer

Multiplayer... well, we'll just say that it's "there". Lag isn't handled too well and while the play itself may be fun, it doesn't grab you like Quake, UT or Counter-Strike might. Weapons are quite balanced since they're mostly situation-specific. Of course, any of the four characters' personal weapon is quite dominant on any of the 6 maps provided, though ammunition is scarce enough.

Your character is very customizable in terms of appearance. There's a wide range of colors to choose from, you can pick any of the 4 models as well. There are brightness controls for extra shading to help tell apart your guys. You can play deathmatch, team deathmatch or something called conquest deathmatch, which we never got to play.

Why, you ask? There is no way to find a server. The game seems to contain something that might be misconstrued as an internal browser, but it didn't search out any games no matter how many times we tried. GameSpy doesn't support it (at least not the freely available version of this writing) and neither does GameSpy Arcade.