Rise Of Nightmares Kinect

As an early Kinect adopter, I had high hopes for it... motion gaming, deeply immersive gameplay... up till now there hasn't been a game that really sucks you in and makes you feel like you are in the game like "Rise of Nightmares"... I found myself flinching, cowering, and being genuinely creeped out by what I was experiencing... brushing leeches from your arms, frantically pushing zombies back before they kill you, beating them to a pulp with a wide array of weapons, all with your body, not a controller... after an hour or so I had to take a break, both mentally and physically... it is a deeply immersive, heart-pounding game!

Is it perfect? No... is it for kids? NO!!! Is it the ground-breaking Kinect title you have been hoping for? YES!

I have been following this game for a year now. The idea of a mature Kinect game with off-rails controls intrigued me heavily. Also knowing that the team behind the House of the Dead series was working on it made things even more optimistic.

The graphics aren't bad, the blood and gore look really good, easily the best looking Kinect game available. The fun is in the immersion the game gives you, however, not the graphics. Even though it is essentially a light-gun game with melee weapons (and you are the lightgun), it actually adds in a pretty hefty story. That story may me convoluted and nonsensical at times, but I was surprised that there was actually something there. The way the game pulls you in is where everything clicks. You actually experience the fear and horror, and while it's not going to have you running for your blankie, there are plenty of creepy moments that will get you jumping.

The meat of the game is moving around various areas searching for your missing wife after she is kidnapped. The thing is, zombies are now everywhere and it's up to you and tons of weapons to take them out for good. Things like lead-pipes, knives, machetes, even garden shears are used to end zombies in the most gruesome ways possible. The combat itself works pretty well. Pretend you are holding a knife and slash or stab the way you would if you were really holding one and the game responds pleasantly and usually pretty accurate. Want to open a door? Simply push it open like you would a real door, or kick it open for dramatic effect. Is there a lever that needs to be activated? Make a "pull lever" motion with your hand and your character will do it. Zombie in your face?...just kick it away and then slice it up. All the actions you have to coordinate may seem overwhelming at first, but they all make sense without the game even having to tell you what to do.

On that note, there is a learning curve for the controls and the game will keep you very active. Remember, this game is optionally off-rails, meaning you move your character with your body. Simply put one foot forward and your character will walk, take a step back and he will walk backwards (you can also just raise your left hand at most places and have your character auto walk to the next point of interest), you turn by moving your shoulders left or right. It really does take some getting used to, but once you get it down, it turns into a blast to play.

Rise of Nightmares is very much an experiment to see what they could really do with Kinect and that experiment mostly shines. Walking and moving can become a hassle at certain points (like moving and combat against multiple enemies), but it's something that won't drag on the overall experience too heavily. I am sure a sequel with multiplayer and more to do after the main single-player experience would greatly increase the replay and fun. As it stands, SEGA once again proves that they are the king of 'lightgun' style games. Nightmares is a solid 10-12 hour game if you don't do a whole lot of exploring and just go to finish the game as quick as possible, other than that, there isn't much in terms of replay value.

Motion gaming has been a subject of hot debate in the gaming industry as of late. Traditional gamers prefer a more hands-on approach with controllers, while more casual gamers shout praise for the advent of easy-to-play experiences utilizing motion controls. Game studios have attempted to gear more motion-based games to traditional gamers in order to not lose their money, which has produced varying results. Leave it to the original development team behind the main "House of the Dead" entries, a series that defined arcade shooters, to show how to do hands-free gaming right. "Rise of Nightmares" is brutal, tense, but most importantly, it's fun.

The game kicks off with alcoholic protagonist Josh in a train while vacationing with his wife. When a flask falls from his jacket, she gets disgusted and storms out of the train car. But when he pursues her to the dining car, he sees her following a strange man to another part of the train. Next thing he knows, the train is crashing, and sent plummeting into a lake. He desperately runs to escape the sinking vessel, finding dry land and regrouping with survivors of the wreck. But just when he thinks it's safe, his party wanders through a corpse-filled forest into a bizarre castle filled with disgusting torture devices and violent undead hoards. With everybody around him dying in the most horrendous of ways, he must keep his wits about him and find his wife by any means necessary. Even if those means involve digging through the guts of a human corpse or decapitating a murderous maid by prying her neck with forceps. Which they totally do.

While the story does take some interesting turns, adding in three very wicked antagonists and a deepening mystery surrounding the castle, the real joys of this game are the scares that wait around every corner. As a longtime survival horror game enthusiast, I more than most would've scoffed at the idea of the genre working so well without a controller. Those scoffs would have been mistaken impressions, however, because this is one of the most downright enjoyable and scary games in that genre that I have experienced in a very long time. Newer "survival horror" games such as "Dead Space" feel like shooters with scares piled on them, and old favorites like "Resident Evil" and "Silent Hill" have often picked action over terror entirely. With "Rise of Nightmares", I felt truly intimidated and panicked as my weapons broke and I was forced to pound away at the faces of zombies with my bare hands, until I could pick up whatever was available to kill them.

And killing is something that this game doesn't take lightly. And by "doesn't take lightly", I mean it makes every weapon you use more fun than they should be. You mimic the motions of every weapon, stabbing with knives, hurling scalpels, closing hedge trimmers, hacking with axes and pushing into foes with a chainsaw. These deaths are actually more brutal than they sound, believe it or not. Sega AM1 knows a little something about gore, and they've truly topped themselves this time. Unrealistic amounts of plasma gush from every enemy, their limbs coming across as nothing more than detachable sacks of red goo. This, coupled with the multitude of death traps that they can be lured (or forced) into, makes for an sickeningly entertaining good time.

While on the topic of sickening violence, it should be pointed out that not only the enemies are subject to these types of gruesome deathes. You will get offed several times by varying traps, and you will watch other captives of the antagonists be slaughtered in increasingly horrendous ways. It's not uncustomary for this game to get you acquainted with a character, only to force you into watching as they get brutally dismembered or disemboweled only moments later. But it's not only the physical violence that's grotesque; the environment succeeds at balancing the perfect air of suspenseful and disgusting. Strategically-placed hanging corpses, loose limbs and sliced-open torsos keep you looking around on high alert, lest what did those victims in comes for you as well. It's a bloody terrifying experience, one that wouldn't be out of place back in the good old days of DreamCast and PS2 J-Horror games.

Those are the types of games that "Rise of Nightmares" is like both in terms of content and plot. The story slowly evolves, or devolves depending on how you look at it, into a bizarre series of nonsensical imagery and concepts. Dialogue takes a turn for the unintentionally funny, and sometimes is simply a concoction of unabashed strangeness. Around the game's halfway point is where AM1's love of convoluted plots, shown in the later HOTD entries, comes out full force. Running through people's dreams, robotic transformations and shooting energy blasts from your bare hands all end up passing as normal occurrences in this game, whether or not it ever makes a lot of sense. It's these types of bizarre, confusing yet intriguing stories that some of my personal favorite survival horror games, like "Rule of Rose" or "D2", consist of, and thus I respect the gung-ho relentlessness that the writers scripted this game with.

An equal amount of respect goes towards crafting the solid controls that the experience is built around. Surviving through what the castle throws at you without a controller is a unique experience, and one that may be the most divisive in the game. The player places one foot forward to walk, using their shoulders to turn and using a single hand to interact with any object in the environment. When the time comes to fight, the player puts up their dukes and assumes a sort of modified boxer's stance. Depending on what weapon a player has, their experience will differ. That experience will shift quite often, because as mentioned above, each weapon has a breaking or depletion point. Typically, an escape route or alternative combat solution isn't too far, though. And with the huge arsenal of weapons (I lost count at how many I picked up during my playthrough), you'll never get bored tearing through enemies.

While all of this works perfectly fine, it could have definitely used some fine-tuning. There were more instances than I care to admit that Josh had a slight turn to his walk that I was not displaying, and picking up the wrong item and having to wait through a sequence of him picking it up only to drop it again happens way too often. The irritating process of cancelling an item pick-up is troubling in a survival horror game, especially one where enemies surround the player frequently. I would've liked to see AM1 give more effort in smoothing over some of the finickiness the Kinect-exclusive controls display.

I would've also liked to see some more zest put into Josh's traversing of the castle. This may just be me, but it's not believable that he would be moving so slowly in such a dangerous situation. Moving slightly faster in the game requires a larger step forward, which ultimately ends up feeling awkward and not worth the pain of standing in a wide stance for so long. So, for the most part, you're stuck going through occasionally expansive corridors with absolutely no way to speed up your movements. It doesn't help that some portions of the castle are incredibly dull to look at and in no way build up any type of suspense. While this may be a bit of a turn-off to some, I found it to be a mild annoyance at best.

The only thing that genuinely annoyed me about this game was the aforementioned inaccuracy of the controls, and the sometimes sloppy lock-on system. Generally, in combat, the player automatically locks onto their enemy and begins whaling at them with their current weapon. But there were times when the lock-on did, in fact, not work at all, and as a result, I was desperately flailing in an attempt to kill my assailant and be done with that particular portion. The lock-on itself is problematic at times, though, because it prevents you from even slightly. While it's understandable that AM1 did this, due to the fact your shoulders shift quite often in combat, it doesn't help when you're being attack by three enemies at once and you can't beat them off. It displays all the control pitfalls of an older survival horror game, really, just updated for a new method of play.

Despite these issues, "Rise of Nightmares" comes off with a serious recommendation from me. While finicky controls hinder it from true greatness, this is nonetheless a very unique and entertaining title from the guys who know hands-on zombie combat better than most. AM1 has crafted a viable reason for traditional gamers to pay attention to the Kinect, and paved a path which more developers are sure to soon tread. It's one of my favorite games this year, in the face of it's questionable control scheme, and will certainly provide many memories for a while to come.

Story: B+

Gameplay: B-

Graphics: B

Sound: B-

Overall: B- (Flawed But Fun)

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