Within my first fifteen minutes of play time with
Psychotoxic, I was already attempting to fathom an explanation for this titles existence. Perhaps the developer, Nuclearvision, produced this game as a joke aimed at the sudden popularity of other titles on the market focusing on psychic gameplay. Surely, this was not a serious effort. Right?
Regardless, within those first fifteen minutes I managed to become stuck in a small box I had no right to enter, jump out of the world twice, only to follow those magical acts with an encore composed of the game crashing to my desktop while attempting to load a previous save. One level down, twenty-nine more to go. Welcome to
Psychotoxic.
As Angie Prophet, you posess superhuman powers that fail to do anything of remote interest, much like your penchant for horrid one-liners and pseudo-goth overtones. For one reason or another, the world is in the middle of a crisis due to wars raging on every continent. What does this have to do with the overall plot? Absolutely nothing. Angie is summoned by the FBI to, single handedly mind you, battle the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, having been summoned by a satanist man known as Aaron Cowley to prevent them from bombing New York city to kingdom come. What is your motivation do do this? Angst and a lot of it.
The story is fed to you largely by in-game cinemas which feature some of the most cringe worthy scipting and voice acting seen since the original Resident Evil. The only problem here is that you're not laughing with it, and it's too pathetic to laugh at it. Instead, you're forced to watch 70's Kung-Fu style lip syncing, and character models awkwardly puppet themselves around which make you wonder if the people at Nuclearvision even realize how the human body performs. By the time you get into the game, you may have already slipped into a coma that the game will ultimately fail to wake you from.
Pyschotoxic's gameplay revolves around two types of levels. Those that take place in the modern world where people are attempting to shoot at you for no reason, and those that take place in the dream world, via Angie's powers that allow her to tap into the minds of unsuspecting victims for information and other various goals. While these dream levels are quite novel and do help to break up the completely uninteresting real world levels, they merely serve as the vehicle for a whole slew of jumping puzzles and other random, First-Person Shooter cliches that I figured died somewhere in the year 1998. Regardless, all of these levels are played exactly the same. Travel from Point A to Point B and kill anything that gets in your way. No thinking here, folks.
The superhuman abilities of Angie also never quite come into full fruition. The game never allows you to believe that she actually has these powers either, considering that they come in the form of power-ups granting you the abilities of a defense shield, healing, slow motion and invisibility. In other psychic games such as Psi-Ops or Second Sight, the psychic aspect of the gameplay stands at the forefront of the design. In
Psychotoxic, picking up your weapon and going "Bang bang bang " and ignoring the whole psychic element seems to work better.
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