	MetalHeart: Replicants Rampage
	Developer: Akella Publisher: Dreamcatcher Release Date: Out Now Players: 1	Words By:
There's something about the dungeons and dragons style RPG that I can find a little dull. I don't mean the way that you play them, it's the setting – a bit beardy for me, and I've seen enough dwarves, mages and elves for one lifetime already. To be fair, I'm much more of a Sci-Fi person, and so the likes of Fallout and Knights of the Old Republic have always been more likely to hold my attention than the Baldurs Gate or Elder Scrolls series. It should mean that MetalHeart was right up my alley - it is an isometric, Sci-Fi RPG, with a well thought out setting and a nice premise for the plot to start out from. You start out with a pair humans in your party who happen to crash land on a planet. They then face somewhat of a struggle to get off of the planet again, as no-one wants to help them leave, and plenty of people would be happy to do away with them. This leads them onto the usual 'do this job for me and I'll introduce you to the person, who knows a person, who knows a person that might just be able to buy you a pair of rollerskates and an umbrella to get you off this planet' type adventure. Along the way you'll meet mutants, cyborgs, replicants and a whole host of interesting characters, as well as being able to surgically install implants into your characters to make them extra kick-ass. As I've already mentioned, the setting is good, the plot starts out well, there's loads of room for customising your characters and even the graphics are pretty good for an isometric game – on paper, this should at the very worst be a nice stop gap until Fallout 3 arrives (if it ever does). But video games are not played on paper. At the centre of an RPG you require quite a lot of detail. You need it in the dialogue, the interactivity with the environment and the characters' back story. There's very little detail anywhere in MetalHeart though, outside of what you need to know to play the game. Worse still, the dialogue is comically bad – The developers are Russian and I can't believe whoever wrote this had English as their first language – there are portions from the dialogue that make so little sense that they may well have come out of an internet language translation engine. One passage: “Forget your jokes and investigate locals about the space port. You can start from this welder. I will stay silent. You can tell that I'm your dumb niece if they ask.” Or better still... “Your life is not worth a pin.” On the upside, the game has almost all the dialogue spoken as well as in text. The text regularly doesn't match the speech though, as the actors obviously ad-lib to try and make some sense of the completely bollocks script they've been given. It's actually almost worth playing the game to the bitter end to find more gems in the script – the actors do act it out well when the script allows, but there's only so much they can make up for. So, no luck on the world detail then. Well, if an RPG can't deliver a detailed, organic environment, then it better deliver on the action front. Sadly MetalHeart is just very average in action – the missions are the usual suspects: fetch; carry; kill some person. Nothing inspiring. The combat is much the same, albeit turn-based - equip a few items, blast away, loot, rinse, repeat. Having said that, the right mouse button is bound to 'throw' for some reason, meaning that more than once I inadvertently threw my machine gun at the enemy! I could even put up with that though if the game wasn't so slow – there are some missions that require you to travel a long way, and your characters aren't very quick – they can only run short distances before they get tired. The areas in Metal Heart aren't that big, meaning you have to cross a lot of small maps to get to your destination, suffering a few seconds loading between each area. Worst of all though, I regularly went into battle mode without any idea of where my enemy was – they can be hard to spot, even when in full view of your character, and there's nothing to indicate who you're fighting. To be honest, I could go on a lot longer with amusing quotations or flaws in the game, but I haven't got the (metal) heart. MetalHeart is obviously well intentioned, but I'm not sure if even the most dedicated Blade Runner, Deus Ex or Fallout loving RPGer could stay the distance with so many obvious problems.

Best Bits
- Nice setting.
- Pretty good graphics.

Worst Bits
- The dialogue is laughable (maybe that's a good thing).
- A lot of gameplay flaws.
- Not enough detail for an RPG.


by: Jocky