By Greg Giddens

The simple gift of clarity was too much to ask of Scorpion: Disfigured.

The year is apparently 2048. Or it could be 2028 – it all depends on whether the manual or the official website is to be believed. You’re an American agent, codenamed Scorpion, sent to investigate claims of human experimentation and advanced weapons technology at the Zenith Corporation. Or Zinyth Enterprises. Or possibly even just Zynith – it’s not clear, as once again, the instruction manual says one thing, the in-game references another, and the official website yet another.

Anyway. After a scientist comes forward with this information and a prototype of a suit that provides the wearer with extraordinary abilities, you’re is sent in with said suit to confirm the claims and stop the human experimentation if it’s true. If the narrative at least gets the ball rolling, unfortunately the ball is struggling uphill from the first level, thanks to an uninspiring internal monologue and support character communication attempting to drive the story but actually getting nowhere.

//Not a page-turner
Information regarding the company and its goals is slowly weaned from encounters with hostiles and data retrieved from computers in each level, which your support character, Judith, then relays back to you during the dynamic missions via an intrusive communication overlay screen. Everything remains unclear: you learn that your primary goal is to obtain a virus that’s been used in the human experimentation, but the context remains unexplained and the compulsion to learn more is nonexistent. There’s a complete lack of information regarding the current state of the world, and thanks to the poor voice acting and terrible pacing, the plot fails to engage on any level. What little interest it might spark is doused by some truly awful design choices, which reverberate through the mechanics and presentation.

In keeping with the unclear manner is the unintuitive setup of the controls. They’re badly mapped to the keyboard and the instruction manual and in-game information tool, ironically called “Wiki”, keeps things hazy with incomplete information. Due to the abilities granted by the suit, there is a multitude of keys to press to activate each one. The use of a radial menu akin to that of Crysis would have solved these issues, but instead the default is mapped to keys right next to the standard W, A, S, D movement keys, in the end this results in frankly stupid defaults such as the ‘use’ key being mapped to H, a key uncomfortably situated too far away from the movement keys. Of course, you can remap them, but their initial positioning is exemplary of the shoddy game as a whole.

//Intelligent design?
Indeed, while the unintuitive setup is offputting, it’s the design choices that truly break the game. On firing your first weapon you’ll notice the extreme recoil, causing your aim to shift from centre mass to way above your target’s head. It makes the initial encounters tricky, to say the least, and when you come into contact with enemies that can fire back, you’ll find long-range fire-fights an impossibility thanks to the alarming recoil. This all encourages close-quarters combat, but charging at firing enemies is ill-advised, as amour and health are lost very quickly and your enemies seemingly don’t suffer from the same recoil problems as you. Accuracy is improved slightly once you upgrade your weapons, but nowhere near enough, and regardless of any new weapons or upgrades you find, at no point does ranged combat become effective.

With weapons being so useless, the suit abilities become more attractive, and almost could have done a decent job dealing with enemies. The psy-attack and telekinesis should be great for dealing damage, the healing handy on the rare occasions when you don’t have enough med-packs, and the rampage and mind control abilities seem perfect for tuning enemies against each other when in larger groups. The problem is that using these abilities requires a great deal of energy from the suit, energy which is charged by batteries you find during your mission – and with a single use of an abilities draining so much of the energy meter, it’s simply not a viable option in heated battle situations, resulting is zero use of tactics and over-use of quick-saving and loading. The flaws all come to a head in one situation in particular, when a scripted sequence takes control away from you during a fire-fight, leaving you stuck to the spot, absorbing bullets and grenades.

//If looks could kill
Scorpion: Disfigured fails to impress in every way. You don’t know who you’re fighting, you don’t know why you’re fighting them, and you don’t know the controls. It all might be just about bearable if it weren’t for the atrocious presentation. Everything looks incredibly dated, with dark, repetitive environments full of poorly animated and detailed enemies that evoke memories of early 3D FPS games, only without the nostalgia. Weapons sound unrealistic, bullet impact animation is so subtle you can’t be sure you hit anything, and the same ‘three scratch marks’ animation adorns your screen for the majority of hits you suffer. Everything is lacking in imagination and quality.

On the one high note, the atmosphere does occasionally feel appropriately ominous, with the mostly awful score occasionally stumbling on a tune fitting to the dark corridors teaming with human experiments gone wrong. But the rest of the music is a cacophony of beeps attempting to portray the futuristic setting that the rest of the game has seemingly forgotten all about.

This is an awful game, plagued by bad choices in design and narrative. That it has been released at all, let alone on separate occasions across a selection of European countries, is baffling.

1/10

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