Vengeance

This is a story I found also years ago when looking for more stories, and since I saw it was featured, I though to myself that it could be good. Now with the review. Also, spoilers below, by the way.

Plot:

I will start with the plot as it’s the main point of this story, the characters being just there to propel it. It goes as follows, the main character is on a school bus that is attacked by people with submachine guns and grenades and survives an impossible situation, which makes the antagonists lock him up in an asylum to study him.

He breaks out, a man with no relationship to anything whatsoever lets him choose among completely ridiculous weapons (only one of them actually makes sense), he saves the daughter of one of the doctors and then travels to Arizona, where the bus was going. There he uncovers more weapons in ludicrous places, like a grappling hook gun in a sandbox in a public park.

After that he single-handedly defeats everyone, assaulting the antagonist’s base and frees his friends. And then the plot is revealed. Apparently one of the girls in the school bus had a gang banger boyfriend and to piss him off she stole some secret immortality serum from him and fed it to the protagonist, a serum which was developed by an insurance company to prevent people from dying and thus earn more money. And the protagonist destroys that utterly diabolical plan.

This little resume is necessary in order to point out how ridiculous the plot is. Let’s start with the antagonist’s plan. He develops an immortality serum and, instead of using it, selling it or whatever he plans to use it to make people his company insured immortal so that it makes bigger profits. Which, according to the story, is a bad and intelligent thing. It surely wouldn’t make more profit to sell it to all the millionaires in the world.

Then we have the gang bangers. First of all, why is a schoolgirl dating the head of an armed to the teeth evil mercenary band? In a long distance relationship too since he is based in Arizona and she lives in New York. Then, why does she steal the prototype of a secret serum just to piss him off, and to hide it from him she feeds it unknowingly to the main protagonist? And he forgives her, for some reason. I mean, immortality or not, if someone fed me an experimental serum developed by Evil Corporation Nº 374 I would be kind of angry with said someone.

Now move on the smaller things. How do these gang bangers cause a school in New York to send its students on a trip to Arizona, then kidnap the entire school bus, murder half the people in it, and somehow hide it from everyone, relocating every family, whist also sending the protagonist to a mental asylum for that? Kind of ludicrous if you ask me.

Afterwards, how does that doctor discover that the protagonist is not crazy? Because it’s never explained at all. And instead of doing anything sensible, he just heads to Arizona from what appears to be Florida, leaving his teenage daughter alone, to investigate things himself.

And how does the protagonist escape the asylum? By digging the wall with his own hands? Sure, if this was Tunguska Gulag from the X-Files, but an asylum in the US? Doubtful to say the least. Although considering how they lock someone with presumed schizophrenia in a solitary confinement padded cell, I guess it’s understood this story happens partially in the 19th century. The fact they do that is also surprising, since they were there to use him as lab rat for the immortality serum, so some sort of actual test might be in order. Like, taking blood samples?

After the protagonist escapes, he finds someone who manages a weapon store that knows he was framed and that also knows he would escape from the asylum. It is never explained how he knows either of those things, by the way. Then he goes on to give the protagonist two free weapons of their choosing. So as a hand-to-hand weapon you can choose between a sword cane (which would be illegal to own, let alone to sell), a scimitar and a spear (both of which make no sense and have no practical use, and wouldn’t be sold by a gun store).

After that choice, he lets you choose between a cho-ko-nu (a medival chinese repeating crossbow which is very common in US gun stores and very sensible as a self defense weapon), a silenced pistol, and a bazooka (which is from World War II, useless, and very illegal. But surely it can’t be an M40 or something along those lines).

The only weapon of the six that makes sense is the pistol, especially taking into account that the crossbow is supposed to have the same advantages. But the game will go out of its way to ensure that in situations where a pistol would make a lot of sense you can only use the crossbow.

Once you get to Arizona, travelling by truck and with no explanation of what happened in the way even though the travel lasted three days since Phoenix is about 3500 kilometres from Florida (also, three days for that much distance? In the US?), you can go to several places of the city that also dont make sense.

You can go to a church, where you find a shovel laying around for some reason, and a priest who tells you he witnessed a kidnapping and didn’t to anything about it, like calling the police (because it is a 14th century church, of course). You can go to a park, where you find the grappling hook pistol in the sandbox, which is there for some reason and in which you spend an hour digging for some other reason. You can go to a library, where someone from the antagonist’s Evil Corporation left his wallet with everything in it (what a coincidence). Then to the insurance company building, where despite knowing they are the enemies you can’t do anything.

After that you join with Melissa in the diner, and then go to a hotel, which is attacked by gang-bangers. You can blow them up with bazooka or grenades and leave, without grabbing any of their actually useful guns. Then you infiltrate the insurance company building again and fight as Spock himself by paralyzing people with impossible ways.

Now a bit of biology. Kicking someone below the elbow can hurt and can render the arm inoperable for a while, it doesn’t turn them into solid rock. Punching someone in the base of the foot can break some bones and render them inoperable due to the pain. It doesn’t turn them into solid rock. Kicking someone in the neck (below the jaw near the carotid artery, where there are plenty of nerves) can hurt, and again leave them inoperable for a short duration, not turn them into solid rock. And for the record, nobody would say “I’m temporarily paralyzed” after being paralyzed, especially since it’s impossible to do so, but if it was possible, they still wouldn’t. And you can’t punch someone unconscious like Chuck Norris, it doesn’t work like that.

After releasing all of his friends, the protagonist is confronted by a bounty hunter, who, for some reason, has a grenade launcher instead of something legal and that made any sense (like a revolver, maybe?). After that the protagonist goes after the boss of the insurance company.

In there you can guess, literally, a door’s combination, and confront the boss. He offers the protagonist to finish the experiment, and then join forces with him. If you accept, he actually does that, which reinforces the fact that he is an idiot, and if you refuse he shoots at you. But, due to the immortality serum that never actually worked before other than with the bus, you survive and go after him.

He tries to fly away on helicopter. If he succeeds, his goons somehow murder everyone, including police, and then take you to the asylum like nothing happened. If you catch him, you can either let him die, in which case your family will be lost forever, since for some reason he is the only one who knows where they are, or save him to get the best ending, in which he admits the conspiracy (the evil, evil conspiracy), frees the doctor and his daughter and everyone all go back to school in New York, and for some reason the CIA doesn’t kidnap the protagonist to use him as lab rat.

Characters:

All characters are one dimensional and are never explained or explored, including the main character, who is a schoolboy that knows judo and can beat an entire army of mercenaries and escape from an asylum and never in the way gets worried, or traumatized or whatever. And this story is tagged as serious, sure.

Writing, vocabulary and technical issues:

The writing is ordinary as well as the vocabulary, but there are no typos that I remember. However, many of the premature endings or death scenes are repeated and don’t really make sense in some situations. Depending on the choices you take, you may see weird things. Not to mention the issues with weapons, in which you can use a crossbow to dispose of three gang-bangers but not a pistol. Also there are no pictures to any of the items, which is not an issue to me personally but someone else might find it distracting or harder to select them.

Conclusions:

Even if I seemed a bit nitpicky, it’s not that terrible of a story. It can be played, and it can be useful to kill some time, but don’t expect anything really serious or sensible. Approach it like a half-random story. It looks like one of those hero stories made for kids or a bad kung fu action movie. I personally didn’t like it, obviously, but it can be enjoyable depending on the mindset the reader is on.

I found this to be a decent game. While the story wasn't very believable or relatable, it was the right length and fun enough to keep me entertained for a few minutes. But honestly, if the game had been longer, I would have probably stopped playing because the plot isn't very logical. The writing was tolerable. At some points, I felt as though I was reading the outline of a plot. Other times, it was as if a grocery list of events was being read off to me. More detailed scenes using the five senses would have been nice, but I'm not complaining too much about this. The grammar was okay. There were a few errors that annoyed me, but it wasn't terrible. I admit that I felt a bit limited with my choices, as it seemed like I was forced to go down one path or else I'd die. As for the characters, I felt disconnected from them. I think that it would've been nice if you had let us get to know them a bit better. The dialogue was a bit unrealistic. For instance, in the scene where you fight two men, one of them shouts, "I've been temporarily paralyzed!" after you hit them. The line appeared incredibly cheesy to me because who in reality would scream that out? Another example is the part when Lillian gives the main character an extremely lengthy confession. Honestly, I found the entire confession scene a bit bizarre, and all her long sentences were rather unrealistic. It might have been better if the narrator informed you of the events rather than her.

Overall, this game was a nice way to pass the time, but it wasn't my favorite. The action was a bit fun, although I sometimes felt that there was too much focus placed on it and not enough development of the plot. The writing was at least understandable, so the game experience was pleasant.

Soke

good

epic

Maybe I didn't get the best ending, but it didn't seem to make much sense. It also seemed a bit railroaded, but, again, maybe that was just me.
Still, good story and better then a lot out there. ??

Best ending possible!

Terrible plot and mulltiple speling mistakes. Kinda fun but i wouldn't reccomend. 3/8

This was a very well written story, and is a great ending for everybody. There were a few plot holes like the asylum, but all in all great game.

Boring as hell