Boiling Point: Road To Hell

Boiling Point: Road To Hell (PC) review

Kieron Gillen

Do note the subtitle. To hell with good intentions. It doesn't matter how many things a game tries to do, all that matters is how well they work. And Boiling Point's many innovations and ideas simply don't work in any acceptable way at all. Abstractly, it mixes Grand Theft Auto with Deus Ex in a South American jungle. In practice...

Let's start with the bugs, because that's the first thing you'll notice too. The game's a mess. An embarrassing mess. In fact, it's almost worth playing for comedy value. It's difficult to pick highlights, but how about the time when reloading caused the car I was driving to become invisible and thus allowed me to hurtle across the countryside in a Wonder-Woman-esque invisi-vehicle manner? Or the time a jungle jaguar flew a hundred or so metres through the air to attack me when I was on the top of a Ziggurat? Or when someone running away got caught in a looping animation, in a Road-to-Nowhere Talking-Heads video manner?

Away from that, there are less amusing examples. For example, if you drop an object, expect to see a standardised box rather than the item you've dropped. Leave your car on the pavement, and you'll come back to find passers-by stuck to it (who all die when you start off again, harming your reputation). Laugh at constant sound errors and random voiced and non-voiced lines. Regularly heaving performance dips, with things entering slide-show-o-vision whenever you reach a major gunfight until your machine has had a nice little think.

While you can't expect a game that mixes genres to match a game that concentrates on a single one, you'd hope they'd do better than this. While you can crawl and crouch, the actual sense of physicality in your guns is entirely lacking. Sure, there are plenty of weapons, but none of them match even the least of Halo's arsenal. The vehicles are equally as lumpen, with none of GTA's tactile pleasure. And the enormous map? Not actually that good a thing, since the majority of it is simply empty jungle. You'll spend most of your time driving between two distant checkpoints, along windy roads, forever.