Creature Shock

The Good
The most noticable aspect of this game are the in-game graphics and atmosphere. Whether wandering down a dark corridor and being ambushed by a big one eyed worm or shooting oncoming aliens in an open air field, the lovingly crafted graphics draw the player in. Everything is done in CG, and the cutscenes blend in well with the in game graphics. The environments are not very varied, but they are very well presented.

The Bad
This game is very simple. You walk forward, shoot whatever pops up, then repeat. Sometimes you shoot a lot of things, mostly its just one or two. The flight sim part of the game is a joke really, almost an afterthought. The game can be incredibly difficult as well, with limited save points and much trial and error going through many of the tunnels.

The Bottom Line
Creature Shock is a first person point and click adventure game similar to Myst with a bit of arcade space flight thrown in for good measure. Although the game is first person and you move around by clicking forward, backward, left, or right, it really isn't a Myst type game. It is based on action, your mouse curser acts as your cross hairs, and when a monster pops up in front of you, you blast it until it is dead. There are variations where the player stands still and shoots aliens in a shooting gallery type situation as well. The game has amazing graphics, even by 2004 standards, but the gameplay is so simplistic and frustrating it can get old quickly.

The Good
The game features some of the most spectacular graphics of its time.

Most of the name giving creatures are really creepy and a challenge to defeat. Discovering their weaknesses while trying to survive the attacks is quite demanding in regard to timing and aiming.

I especially liked the suspense-packed atmosphere provided by the scary environments that threaten to hide horrible surprises around every corner.

The Bad
I really detest the gameplay of the two flight sequences in the game. It's even worse than the one of Rebel Assault. It seems to be almost impossible to avoid collisions and aiming is a game of chance. Additionally these sequences' graphics are far inferior to the rest of the game.

The constraint to redo the whole mission on failure is very frustrating as well as the possibility to run into literally dead ends.

Despite the great overall graphics the human character models look disproportionate and poorly animated.

The Bottom Line
Creature Shock is a first person shoot 'em up with control model similar to Myst. You can only choose from a set of predefined directions to advance without direct control of the movement. Equipped with a single gun and a protective energy shield only, the player must be prepared to encounter face to face combat after every new direction chosen.

The Story doesn't really matter. It's about the usual encounter with an unknown alien race. First the player has to save a captured sexy chick space ship captain and then the whole solar system by shooting anything that gets in the way.

The alien fiends cover a variety of different shapes and sizes. The rather small ones include arthropods, bat like creatures, or insect forms. There are some humanoids too but the major threats come as big worms and spiders or a combination of both. Most of them can only be killed by hitting weak spots that may be really small or are just revealed by certain movements. So timing is crucial during the fight sequences, especially because you cannot shoot and activate your energy shield at the same time. Also using the shield too long or to often will deplete your power supply which also charges your gun.

Besides these challenging fight sequences the exploration of the labyrinth like alien facilities is one of the major gameplay ingredients I feel comfortable with. Sadly the intermediate flight sequence missions are a real nuisance and don't fit in by their look and feel.

After-all Creature Shock is a real scary game with great graphics and an exiting atmosphere. A large part of the game is demanding in a positive kind of way, though it can be unduly frustrating too.

The Good
This game features great atmosphere and breath-taking action scenes.It's also very difficult to complete because you cannot save your game wherever you want.However the game autosaves your position every time you accomplish each mission.This is good in my opinion,because if you could save wherever you wanted the game would be fairly easy

The Bad
As stated in the review,a couple of missions take place in space where you pilot a space-craft.These missions are very difficult and really annoying because you have to shoot around the screen without actually stopping for a second.

The Bottom Line
Overall,creature shock is a great arcade game which is recommended to everyone who wishes an action-packed game(but not an easy one...)

The Good
What a wonderful game, it's extremely fun to play. I am totally stuck in the alien ship now because the difficulty level of this game (to me) is quite high even in the EASY mode. The graphics are ahead of its time, a shame they don't make games like this anymore. This game has gotten horrible reviews I am shocked that people treat this game so badly. So far I'm loving it and don't see what people speak of. I bought it off eBay not too long ago. I just can't wait to move on this stage and see the rest!

The Bad
The difficulty level is high (even on easy mode). Otherwise nothing. I love this game!

The Bottom Line
Don't pay too much attention to other reviews, try the game yourself. The game so far is great to me. It's difficult, no doubt, that doesn't take away the fact that it's a great game.

The Good
I played it, so you don't have to.

The Bad
This game was being sold in stores.

The Bottom Line
Bad games are released all the time. But when a game is so bad it can barely be classified as a videogame, you know something's not right. I'm not even going to waste my time writing an unnecessary long review and I'm just gonna get straight to the point.

The premise of this "game" is that one fateful day humanity decides to colonize other planets and to do this they construct various starships to explore some parts of the universe. Nothing spectacular, but I guess it was nice for 1994. You begin the game with a cutscene that shows one of said ships approaching an asteroid, until said asteroid actually reveals itself to be an alien and extents tentacles to the ship taking it to deep space. The cutscene looks promising, and after that you realize you need to find out what the hell happened to the starship and blast off the bad guys.

That is about all that is good about this game. This is where things start to suck. You begin the game aboard a space ship in what appears to be a space shooting game. All you do is click to shoot everything that appears in front of you, you don't even get to know what you're shooting at, there is no timer so you don't know how long it takes for you to reach your goal, and then you get to fight one huge brown thing that appears to be an alien ship, using the same strategy you used for the rest of the level. Maybe the Cyberdemon protip was exactly inspired from this game, that is, "Shoot it until it dies". No strategy whatsoever, just click the fire button like if your life depended on it and you're done.

Now, after this awful attempt at space shooting we actually get to the "first person" part if that's how we can call it. Right after you blow up the brown ship you land in some sort of place, I don't even know how to call it because you don't actually get to know how you got there. And this is where the real action is supposed to begin. Unfortunately, what follows is even worse than the space shooting sequence: You're given a weapon and all you have to do is aim at various monsters that pop up in front of you and kill all of them to proceed to the next stage. You can't move your character, there is no way to avoid enemy fire, there is no strategy in the fights, all you have to do is shoot at them before they can shoot you. It's the most boring, awful and frustrating experience one can ever see in a videogame, because there's basically no gameplay at all

This pretty much sums up the whole game. There is nothing to do in this game except for pressing one or two buttons. However, there is one thing that deserves mention: The graphics truly are outstanding for the time it was released, and they're all well animated, even though they look a bit "weird", but it's the overall style of them that makes them feel as such.

But, as the review on HOTU said, "Rule number one in computer gaming industry: good graphics do NOT a game make". This game can barely be called such because there is... no gameplay. There really is nothing to do here. There is no reason at all to buy this game or even to download it because there's no value on it aside for the graphics which even then, have no rotations and may not be compared to doom/duke nukem 3d graphics. Whatever you do, don't get this game, stay away from it, cover your ears whenever you hear talking about it, destroy every copy of it you find: it is the definition of all that is wrong with videogames, graphics over gameplay.

Now that you're done reading this review, you might as well consider playing some real videogames. Titles like this one just need to be forgotten and never be heard of again.