Game Reviews

Total Recall

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| Total Recall Game
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Total Recall
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| Total Recall Game

There are few things more frustrating than a game that almost gets it right. When you're tantalisingly close to enjoying yourself, a spanner in the works somehow feels worse than when you've been drudging through mediocrity since the tutorial.

That's the problem with Total Recall. It approaches greatness, only to trip just before it gets there, smashing open its head and letting all the gooey goodness dribble away into a puddle of broken controls and odd design choices.

Memory lapse

The game is an FPS that closely follows the plot of this summer's blockbuster reimagining of the Philip K. Dick short story. That means you're playing a character who looks vaguely like Colin Farrell rather than one who looks vaguely like Arnie.

You're on-rails, dragged from cover point to cover point without any say in the matter. This lets you concentrate on shooting, and bypasses one of the main problems of fitting a first person shooter onto a touchscreen device.

There are on-screen buttons for firing, looking down the sights of the weapon you have equipped, and reloading. You can also heal and give your damage a boost by tapping on the futuristic potions in the top-left corner.

You dive into cover by tapping a button in the bottom-left, and let go to pop up and dispatch a few grunts before flopping back down to reload and catch your breath. It's all very Time Crisis.

Total recoil

Or at least it should be. You control the way you're facing by swiping a finger across the screen, but the action is so ponderous that it often feels like there's a weight tied around not-quite-Colin's neck.

When you're being fired at from three positions and it takes three or four seconds to move from one target to another, you know something's not quite right.

Then there's the way dropping into cover can often mean getting shot from a different angle, which sort of defeats the purpose of dropping into cover.

All of the ingredients are in place for Total Recall to be a brilliant shooter, but the end result is a befuddled and frustrating mess, all wrapped up in a nonsensical weapon upgrade system that means you have to buy a gun before you can even play the first level. Arnie would never have put up with this.

Android version reviewed.

Total Recall

With a few tweaks, Total Recall could be the touchscreen shooter we've been waiting for, but as it stands it's a clumsy, frustrating mess
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.