Kiss Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child is an intense
first-person shooter based on the rich world created by Todd
McFarlane in his bestselling Kiss Psycho Circus comic books. The
world of the Psycho Circus comes alive with vivid, combat-heavy
environments, a wall of audio, and more eye candy than a Kiss
concert.
The game plunges you into a demonic world of mystery and horror,
where you must battle the hideous freaks of nature spawned by the
dreams of The Nightmare Child. Players begin as a mere mortal and
progressively acquire the powers of The Elder, the supernatural
alter egos of Kiss. The Elder, embodied through Demon,
Starbearer, Beast King, and Celestial, must prevent the
unraveling of the cosmos.
The nightmare minions are largely split into three groups: horde
creatures, circus mutants, and bosses. The hordes have their
strength in numbers and come at you by the truckload; the circus
thugs are stronger, smarter, and possess special abilities that
vary depending on their profession. At the heart of each realm is
a nightmarish boss, who puts your powers to the ultimate test.
Review
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When you see the word "KISS" in the title and four different
retail box designs each spotlighting one of the members of KISS,
you might reasonably expect that KISS: Psycho Circus - The
Nightmare Child would feature wall-to-wall KISS - kind of like
this sentence. But oddly enough, KISS: Psycho Circus contains
very little of the legendary rockers - some coy song references,
snippets from a few hits, and a portrait of Paul Stanley are
about as KISS as it gets. As such, faithful members of the KISS
Army hoping for the ultimate rock shooter will be particularly
disappointed with Psycho Circus, the first game by Third Law
Interactive, a development house founded by ex-Ion Storm
employees. For everyone else, Third Law's attempt to re-create
the frantic action of classic first-person shooters such as Doom
is fairly good but ultimately too formulaic. KISS: Psycho Circus
is actually based on the Todd McFarlane comic book of the same
name. Unlike the band, the game makes absolutely no attempt to
rock - instead, it has a generic techno soundtrack. What's worse,
it's a techno version of a KISS song! And if the story in the
game is any indication of the quality of storytelling in the
comic book, then Third Law might have been better off spending
its Todd MacFarlane money on a tanker truck full of Blatz. Let's
just say the plot involves a witch speaking - at great length -
about some indecipherable mumbo jumbo.
You control the four members of a band that isn't KISS as each
one battles through a multipart level picking up pieces of a KISS
costume along the way. Once you've completed the four areas, a
fifth and final level opens up.
The environments are each quite large and compose a sort of
"greatest hits" package of shooter themes. The castles of Unreal,
the modern offices of Half-Life, the freak show of Blood, the
steel of Kingpin, and the hellish pits of Doom all return
in spirit in KISS: Psycho Circus. Even the greenish canyons of
Daikatana make an appearance. Psycho Circus does have a few
original settings, such as a towering 50-story bookcase. The game
uses a heavily modified version of the LithTech engine used in
Shogo and Blood II, and generally speaking, it does an excellent
job. Though often unoriginal, the levels look good.
Psycho Circus is a pure shooter. The challenge lies solely in
combating endless waves of enemies as you move from the start to
the end of every level. The game throws a lot of monsters at you,
sometimes as many as 20 at a time. You haven't seen swarms of
monsters this dense in a shooter since the heyday of Doom, and at
first, it's exhilarating having so much to shoot. Setting off a
jack-in-the-box grenade in the midst of ten creatures is
undeniably satisfying. However, like most of the weapons in the
game - especially what passes for the rocket launcher - the
jack-in-the-box seems underpowered. And unfortunately, once
you've played the first ten minutes of Psycho Circus, you might
as well have played the first ten hours. Though there's an
occasional exception, the same creatures appear throughout the
entire game. Some of the enemies are totally forgettable, such as
the spiderlike Headless, which appears in virtually every battle
in the game. Other monsters in Psycho Circus are more
interesting, such as a zombified lady who rips chunks of
blubber out of her distended belly and tosses them at you. But
because the fights aren't particularly or tense, the
experience becomes repetitive long before Psycho Circus is over.
There's yet to be a shooter since Quake III and Unreal
Tournament that's earned as much praise for its multiplayer
gameplay. Psycho Circus doesn't break this trend: it features
nothing more than standard deathmatch and team deathmatch.
There's also a mode called conquest, but it's just deathmatch
with a scoring adjustment. Psycho Circus doesn't have a built-in
game finder either, nor does it include Mplayer, Game, or any
other third-party matchup service. Worse yet, once you actually
locate a server, you might encounter fairly regular ces back
to your desktop.
Aside from its drab multiplayer mode, KISS: Psycho Circus is
fairly entertaining. Unfortunately, apart from the fact that the
band itself makes too few appearances, the core gameplay is too
shallow to sustain the entire game. The firefights are too
similar to provide much excitement the tenth time through, much
less the hundredth. Ultimately, Psycho Circus is one game you and
the boys won't be playing all night.--Erik Wolpaw--Copyright ©
2000 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or
in part in any form or medium without express written permission
of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot Review