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Every so often, a game comes along so packed with potential you almost have to love it, but so flawed that you just can't. Insecticide was just such a heartbreaker. It had a brilliant sense of style, but the Nintendo DS hardware crippled the controls and graphics, leaving us to imagine what could have been. Second chances don't come around often in this business, so when I saw that Crackpot was giving its first attempt a second shot on PC, I approached Insecticide Part I with a guarded sense of optimism and a whole lot of hope.
If you missed it the first time around, this is the brainchild of Larry Ahern and Mike Levine, two artists that made their name working on classic adventure games like Sam & Max Hit the Road and Curse of Monkey Island. Like Tim Shafer's Psychonauts, this is an attempt to infuse some of the classic LucasArts ethic into a more action-oriented game. That means a thick story, an emphasis on characters, and unique world with a memorable visual style.
A lighthearted satire of gritty cop dramas and film noir, the story follows two cops in Troi, a city of giant bugs living less than peacefully alongside a few humans, generally regarded as pests. Roachy, a world-weary gravel-voiced chain-smoker plays narrator to the adventures of Chrys, an athletic, four-legged detective with a mysterious past, and the game's only playable character. This world is at once grimy and beautiful, with a visual style that screams of Psychonauts. The dark, colorful, slightly Tim Burton-esque aesthetic has a style of its own, but you can still see the same effort has been taken to make personality pop from the screen.
This new version has been given the production value and technology needed to do the art justice.
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It really helps that this new PC version has been given the production value and technology needed to do the art justice. This may look more like a last-gen title than something cutting edge, but the eye-popping artwork stands out more than any blurry textures or sharp corners. All of the dialog is voiced now, and the old rendered cut scenes are complimented by many new ones. Despite the episodic format (this is now a two-parter) and download-only distribution, this doesn't feel like a budget title.
Insecticide Part I is still very much the same game I played on the DS, but many subtleties of the design have been rethought. The clumsy controls were the biggest flaw of the original game, so I was somewhat dismayed when I fired up the PC version, only to find that there is no controller support. Surely Crackpot wouldn't drop the ball twice. While more control options are always good, I quickly realized that the change reflected a shift in the game design itself. This was now much more of a shooter and less of a platformer, with higher enemy counts, and relatively little in the way of precision jumping. The FPS-style keyboard-and-mouse controls make sense in the context of the run-and-gun gameplay style that is dominant here.
The levels are the same, but the layouts have been altered in places. Some spots seem almost exactly the same, while other contain new puzzles or radical makeovers that render them almost unrecognizable. Very little seems to be missing compared to the DS version, and some of the levels have gotten longer and more complex. They're still mostly linear shooting exercises, but there's a lot more refinement, as well as a lot more visual variety, which helps ease the sense of repetition just a bit.
Between the action stages there are "investigation" scenes that stay pretty close to the classic adventure genre. The control scheme is different here. There are limited areas where you'll be able to switch to interact with objects a point-and-click interface and interrogate characters with dialog trees. These sequences are pretty limited and won't impress hardcore adventure buffs, but they help to develop the story and characters, and they're a nice tip of the hat to Crackpot's roots.
This PC release has demystified Insecticide in a lot of ways. This is a title that will charm the pants off just about anyone, and now it has some perfectly solid gameplay to back it up, but it really is more style than substance. It's a simple, repetitive third-person shooter, with wimpy weapons and not much intensity. It isn't a great shooter, and it's not a great adventure game, but it wraps it all up with a wink and a smile that makes it very hard to resist. It might fall short of true excellence, but it's great to see more than just wasted potential.
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