Saul Meyers: License to Win
Lately, many games have began to adopt the whole Sand Box Theory, that all games with freedom do well on the market. I mean, with so many good examples as Morrowind and GTA, who could fail? Well Deep Shadows tried making one of those sand box games, and they spat out this game called "Boiling Point". This game attempts to take the gritty South American drug lord thing and combine it with a freedom that would drive Michael Moore nuts. Through the games gameplay, sound, and graphics it attempts to place you into a world of its creating.
The first thing you notice, while installing the game, is the games sound score. Now I never liked Spanish music, and the fact that one of the corniest songs I have ever heard was playing over and over during the install just began to make me think, "oh god, the whole game better not be like this." Well, to my displeasure, it was. The game doesn't support 5.1 channels SS or above, which kicked me in the balls when I got around to play it. The game's sound constantly keeps crackling out and drowning off into some abyss of nothing. This can get frustrating while having a conversation with an npc.
After the initial shock of the music, you are introduce to the game's storyline. The intro shows much of what the game has to offer. The graphics are subpar, but the overall size of the game makes you feel like its ok. Because of the game's massive size, your computer may sputter a few times, spitting spark flavored vocabulary in your direction. The game's graphics are similar to an archaic form of Far Cry. It tries its best to make up for with the size, but thats the games largest enemy, because it constantly is laiden with unsightley bugs.
The final thing in the game is the actual gameplay. Now don't get me wrong, I love open ended gameplay. But there are so many options, and so much to do I constantly found myself going around running over old ladies trying to sell oranges for kicks. This made me digress from the overall story, and the constant stuttering kept making me crashing me cars into the water. This made me restart my game over and over. A few times, when I actually did get into the game, there would be a critical error, and I would remember, "By god I didn't save!" If this is the PC's answer to GTA, they did a shotty job.
Overall, the game suffers from a lot of bugs. Deep Shadows, a new gaming company, just reared back and placed this steaming pile of crap in our sand box. The game itself can be great, if you can look past all the unsightly bugs scattered everywhere.
