Daikatana

John Romero has finally made me his bitch and it only cost 97¢. This game was widely panned when it came out and I always thought that it couldn’t possibly have been that bad. Well, I’m sorry to say, Daikatana is not a good game even when considering the context of when it came out. The fact that this shipped after Half-Life and Deus Ex adds even more weight to the case against it.

It was an ambitious game: a first-person shooter with a deep story and sidekick characters to help you along in your quest all played against the backdrop of time-travel and wildly varied environments. What we get are overly-long exposition dump cutscenes, constantly trying to keep your sidekicks from getting stuck on ladders, and, most egregiously, bland FPS shooting mechanics.

Thankfully there is a fan-made patch that helps out with some of the technical problems that still exist and also does away with some of the worst design decisions such as limiting saves based on collecting “save tokens” in the game. If you can make it to the first time-travel jump, it does get somewhat better, but the first episode is absolutely terrible. You are immediately (well after a 10 minute cutscene) dropped into a swamp in which you can be instantly killed by well-camouflaged mosquitos and frogs. I powered through but I can’t say it was worth it.