Platform: PC
Category: FPS
Maker: Ion Storm / Eidos Interactive
ESRB Rating: Mature
Reviewed by: ANT Caustic

Here, then, is my public apology to John Romero and Co.:

Dear John,
I'm very sorry to have publicly trashed your latest work, Daikatana, throughout the course of E3, based purely on the demo that I had played a few times. Your game really isn't that bad, after all.
Sincerely,
ANT Caustic

My first impressions (see below) weren't that far off base, but the game grew on me a lot after finishing the first episode. When playing, I tried very hard to take away the fact that the game has been hyped for years and years on a level with the Second Coming. I tried to ignore the fact that we've waited through false release date after false release date. I also tried to ignore the fact that I am crazy in lust with Stevie Case. I wanted desperately to review the game based on it's own merits.

The most obvious thing about Daikatana is that it looks dated. Because it was built on the Quake II engine, it lags severely behind what you're probably accustomed to, graphically. It ran very smoothly on a PII 450 with a VooDoo3 video card, but the weaknesses showed up just as well. The characters flip between 2D and 3D, and the faces are static (no mouth movement to match the voice acting), which makes it appear that everyone is wearing masks. The bad guys explode when killed, looking more like broken mannequin parts than chunky flesh.

Playwise, I'm reminded very much of Half-Life, but with some important differences, both good and bad. On the positive end, there's a lot of creativity shown here. There's a great variety of monsters and weaponry introduced throughout each of the 24 levels, including the game's namesake, found at the end of the first act and carried through the rest of the game. There's a lot to get used to, weapon wise, but that helps keep the game fresh in the later levels. It definitely makes up for the lack of secondary attacks, as found in Doom and such.

The game has a minor strategic element in that both Hiro and the Daikatana gain experience for enemies killed, experience which can be translated into skill points, increasing speed, power, etc. Not only do you have to decide what ability you want to increase when the skill points become available, but you have to choose whether to get the experience for the sword (by making the kills with the Daikatana) or for Hiro (by using any other weapon to deliver the killing blow). As well, you can decide early on whether you want to blow through the game, going straight for the act endings, or you can spend some extra time looking for hidden areas and secret power-ups, of which there are plenty.

Now for the negative aspect: the sidekicks. Superfly and Mikiko are cursed swords that you are required to carry; while they are useful in that they fight with you and can actually do a lot of helpful extra damage, they can also hurt you. Friendly fire has to be taken into consideration, and here's the real rub -- if they die, you die. Not so bad, you might think, until you find out that you have little actual control over their actions. Time after time, I told them to stay, while I went ahead to clear out an area, and turned around to find them still behind me. More than once, one of them was the reason for starting from the last save point, either from friendly fire, stupid behavior on their part, or watching them get crushed by a door, or all things.

The ammo and health packs are plentiful, until the sidekicks have hooked up with you, at which point it becomes a minor challenge to stay stocked. The creatures, however, also multiply, so at least in this sense, the two helping hands are welcome. If you get separated accidentally, though, watch out, because you can't progress to the next levels without them by your side, so you may find yourself hunting them down and herding them toward the level exit.

The sound is pretty good, as well. The music is nonintrusive, but cool, and fits the scenes pretty well. There aren't any really obnoxious enemy noises (except for the roboskeet, which sounds as irritating as a real mosquito). Oh, but wait -- I'm managing to block out Superfly's one liners, which will make you want to direct all your firepower his way. Besides the constant half-threat of "Next time, it's yo' ass" anytime you push him, Romero decided it would be cool to have him randomly emit -- you guessed it --"Wasssssssssupppppppp!" Nothing could have been more obnoxiously mistimed.

Multiplayer was pretty good, as well, though aimed blatantly at the professional. Newbies be warned -- if this is your first multiplayer experience, the fragfest that it will turn in to may very well turn you off to the concept forever. There are cooperative and capture-the-flag modes, as well as a cooperative multiplayer mode for the single player episodes, wherein a second player replaces the AI of one of the sidekicks.

If you decide to judge the game from it's first episode, you'll be doing yourself a serious disservice. The game improves as you go, particularly in level design (my personal favourite is the second, recreating Greece in impressive atmospheric detail). The sidekicks could have gone, and my rating would have gone up tremendously. The graphics could have been a bit more current, and this game would have picked up a few points. I'm not sure what kind of replay value this one will have, and the multiplayer being geared toward the pros limits it from that aspect as well, but overall, the game is pretty damned good. I recommend this game to those who haven't had a good FPS in their life for a while, and to anyone who wants to know what all the hubbub is about. Be prepared for a challenge, though -- Romero's reputation has some pretty good basis in ability.

[First Impression]
[Probable Rating: 70%]

After about two hours playing time on the long-awaited Daikatana, I have only one thing to say:

Welcome back, 1998.

The game is not as bad as we had feared (I had circulated the demo around the ANT headquarters and laughed heartily), but it's nothing special. Had we not seen Half-Life, it would be worthy of its hype, at least on first glance. However, we have seen Half-Life, and for that matter, everything that has come since. It becomes fairly obvious after a little play that this game was conceived and started in the mid-1990s.

Romero's lack of imagination shows from the start. The story is clichéd and worn thin, based on everything a thirteen-year-old boy wants to hear (which, granted, may have been the intention). A Japanese sword teacher, Hiro Miyamoto, is approached by an old man, who tells him of the Daikatana, an extremely powerful sword with magical properties, that was stolen (and is in the possession of) Kage Mishima. The old man tells Hiro, in short, that the Daikatana must be recovered, the old man's daughter, Mikiko Ebihara, must be rescued, and that Hiro must set the flow of time back properly. The old man is assassinated before Hiro can respond, and the game begins.

It should be noted, at this point, that Hiro has an American accent, but the other characters in the first levels are extremely stereotyped Oriental accents. Offensively so.

The weapons are, so far, a plasma-based rifle and a C4 launcher. The controls are fairly simple, mainly because we've seen them over and over again. The creatures in the first level, as noted in many reviews of the demo, are robotic crocodiles, frogs, and mosquitoes -- nothing too difficult to handle, especially once you figure out where they are likely to hide. There are the requisite secret areas as well, containing nifty but predictable power-ups.

According to the box -- I haven't gotten nearly inside the game enough yet to verify this -- there are 25 weapons, 50 monsters, and 24 levels. There are, of course, multiplayer capabilities. The sound is really good, if nothing special, but the graphics -- honestly, there's no excuse for the graphics to appear this dated. The backgrounds are nothing fantastic, the characters and monsters seem to fade in and out from 2D to 3D, and the walls are boxy and sharply angled. The lighting is good, but that's really nothing to harp about, given that the game has been in production for as long as it has.

I look forward to finding out more about the game, but my first impression is this: Without the hype, this might have been a pretty decent game. Were it three years ago, this would be a pretty decent game. Were there not so many blatant problems that should have been corrected in the monstrous production period, it might be a pretty decent game. But pretty decent is really the best that it ever could've been.