Scurge: Hive (NDS&GBA)
2006 Orbital
In a nutshell: Samus meets Solstice, kinda. Slightly awkard isometric weeaTroid (Note I didn’t say Metroidvania) with a sense of urgency to keep you on the move.
In the far flung future, the same logic behind the Evil Corporate Fellows who wanted to capture and breed the monsters from the Alien quadrilogy has lead to a military lab’s experiments with a parasitic scourge dubbed the… Scurge running amok. And it’s up to a highly trained professional with improbably long hair and a bit of a bodysuit wedgie going on to stop it. That’s basically how the adventure begins.
Actually, as far as I’m concerned the adventure begins with the odd choice that the makers gave players: You could get virtually the same game for $19.99 for the GBA as the DS version, which was $29.99. Neither moved off the shelves around here especially fast, so inevitably the day came when I walked into the local EBGames and saw the formerly more expensie DS version going for 15 bucks while the GBA one stayed steady at 20. I had a good laugh and picked it up after all.
The main character is one Jenosa Arma, a bounty hunter whose strict confidentiality policy makes her really popular with the military. Actually, the assurance of her simply being a ‘professional’ who keeps her clients under wraps kind of suggests there might be other services she offers, but that could just be my mind wandering. At any rate, she receives a suspsiciously vague contract from a military lab, but the bounty offered is simply too much to refuse, so off she goes only to have something from the planet’s surface fling a Scurge-laden chunk of debris at her ship. She quickly contains it, but is infected in the process. Clad in a state of the art hazard suit that doesn’t cover her face or head at all, she can now (hopefully) slow the infection down enough to get to the source of it and exterminate it before going completely under.
The game’s basic flow and premise is a lot like Metroid Fusion, but the actual play is a lot different, and not just due to the 3/4ths perspective of the proceedings. Not only do you have to race against time to the next save point/decontamination room as your infection rate climbs, your enemies attack in droves, often respawning without end. Where Metroid beasties seem to pick a ledge and pace back and forth on it, Scurge’s enemies are infinitely more proactive and charge right at you as soon as the door opens. Pressure’s on you pretty much constantly in one way or another, from the timed door lock segments to the omnipresent and always climbing infection meter. Once the suit’s resistance is used up, your actual HP begins to be eaten away, and it seems that once you hit 100% once, the decontamination rooms can only restore you to 2% instead of 1%. So, potential yikes if you like to push it.
You have a lot of moves at your disposal, at least. Jenosa can grab ledges, shimmy on pipes, and, like most video game heroes and heroines, leap pretty well. Actually, she seems to somersault a bit much in relation to the actual height of the jump. Again; Jenosa, bitch, honey- biohazard suits typically have helmets.
Also complicating things is the use of an ‘element’ system in regards to your suit’s weaponry. Your basic blaster can do okay against all enemies, but to be truly efficient you have to switch to other weapons like the EMP burst- it damages mechanical enemies heavily and can energize various devices around the lab, but does little to faze the biological enemies, and actually makes energy beings stronger. So the key lies in being able to switch up on the fly and try to avoid giving enemies a boost with stray fire.
Bosses are predictably big and nasty as can be expected in a ‘throbbing, mutating virus on the loose’ scenario. Some of them regenerate health quickly via extra pods, forcing you to take out the pods, focus on the boss for a while, then quickly take them down again when the pods reform. It can get pretty tedious. I know I was already a bit tired of it the first time it happened, which was the first boss.
Did I mention that throughout, Jenosa has chats about her mission with the backup of her ship’s AI, Magellan at various computer terminals? Totally nothing like Samus and Adam Malkovich.
My biggest gripe about the game is also ironically, the thing I kind of like about it. The constant push to progress makes things exciting and contributes to the story’s urgency, but at the same time, trying to make precision jumps, or tether-drag blocks onto a switch while being literally swarmed by munching critters can be immensely frustrating. Trying to leap off a moving platform at the precise moment while hovering fireballs and ground-bound goo-spitters are bombarding you to knock you off gets very old, very fast, especially when your infection rate is starting to top off.
Scurge isn’t a bad game for the money, considering it’s basically a budget Metroid or Lunar Knights. And also considering ‘The Money’ was half its original tag, in this case. With some tuning up, this could well serve as the start of a pretty enjoyable series, though I don’t see any sequels in the works. I’d give it 3 or 3 and a half Vaguely Positive Symbols outta five.
Sprite Discrepancy: Just worth mentioning that Jenosa looks like either Joanne Dark or one of the extras from Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex during cut-scenes, but a lot more like Roomi from Galaxy Fight in game. Especially with her bouncy stance and wild ponytail. I can’t help but wonder if they went through more than one graphic team during the making of the game- especially since the manual for the game shows a completely different logo than what actually appears on the title screen and cover art:
Whoops. I mean:
