Vice: Project Doom (1991)

Beat. I did the first 3 stages at normal speed, which on my emulator seems faster than NES hardware. The 3rd boss kicked my ass hard because of his spread fireballs, jumping around, and charging across the screen. I slowed it down to 30 frames per second and still had to look up a walkthrough to learn what to do. The trick was getting right up in his face and crouching so the lowest fireball went over my head. Of course I also had to keep up with his movements and jump over the charge. It was an odd difficulty spike because every other boss (other than the final final boss) was easy to figure out. The 2D platforming stages (which were most of the game) were the highlight of the game. There were a few tricky jumps and cheap knockback into pits but enemies did not respawn like in other similar games. It was a blast to play through each stage switching between the 3 weapons tactically and timing them to defeat enemies. The melee was extremely forgiving because he swung it in an arc starting behind his head, overhead, and all the way to just below his feet. This made it difficult for enemies to get in for contact damage and I used melee to kill most enemies and bosses. It also did very good dps. The gun was short range and could fire fairly fast. Most enemies died in 1 hit so dps was mainly for bosses. There were only a handful of times that I used the gun because of the limited range, usually when a ranged enemy was above on a higher platform or I could crouch under their shots while there was a pit separating. Most of the time I found it better to time enemy shots to safely close in for melee or use the long range grenades, so I was sitting on 99 bullets most of the time. This changed in the 1st person rail shooter stages where I went through bullets quickly. I lost a life on the boss of the 2nd shoot em up stage and let it proceed rather than save scum. Unfortunately the next stage was 1st person and I barely scraped by with single digit bullets and grenades. I must have lost ammo on death. Oh well, ammo was plentiful on the platforming stages. The end stages were much more difficult with tough enemies and jumps. The final boss had the same moves as the player (except grenades) and I quickly discovered that he could be easily baited into using easy to crouch under shots while I shot him back. The final form though was ridiculously difficult. He only took damage to the head, which was only vulnerable for a very brief window before he shot out lateral wave beams. I could get him with grenades fairly easily but did not have near enough to finish him. Shooting him with the gun was incredibly difficult and took severe save state scumming. I eventually gave up on that and did the walkthrough tactic of going under him to melee. The trick was moving left then right to avoid getting bit.

This was a fun very well crafted top tier NES game with cutscenes and a decent story. The ending did not really seem to resolve anything though. Like sure the leader of the corporation was defeated, but what about the next clone and the aliens behind the whole thing? Seemed like there could have been a sequel or at least another stage or 2 to deal with them. Or even resolve it during the ending, like the aliens were too weak to put up any fight and were easily stopped. Or maybe they were benevolent all along and the corporation was misusing its power for its own interests against the wishes of the aliens. The level design felt a little disjointed from the narrative and there was no explanation for all the weird hostile creatures but those were small flaws on an otherwise excellent game.

8.8/10

(This is the 39th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Vice: Project Doom is definitely one of the best named games I've played so far. Is it one of the best games games though? Well, not really. It does some things really, really well, it has a lot more storytelling than you would expect from NES titles, but it is a game that shares similarities with many, many other games out there and other games have done many things better than this one.

This game released on April 26, 1991 for NES in Japan and NA, and got a release on Nintendo Switch Online in August 2019.

STORY(TELLING)/CHARACTERS | 6/10

You play Detective Hart, to is tasked with investigating the "BEDA corporation", a front run by alien beings living on Earth in secrecy. They've developed a substance that was supposed to be food for the Aliens, however has been misused by humans due to its addictive natures, despite the fact that it has very bad side-effects.

Usually I would mention how the story resolves because for the vast majority of games, the plot and the storytelling in particular are afterthoughts. Not here. Vice: Project of Doom stands out in its storytelling and the sheer volume of its cutscenes. If I had to give a comparison, I think the Ninja Gaiden series fits best. After every stage, a cutscene plays with shots of the characters and lines of dialogue below. The camera pans left to right during these and the characters remain still otherwise, but this is very much unusual for this time and the #1 factor in which this game stands out.

There are some twists and turns in the story as well. That said, the storytelling isn't that great, probably because devs back then were game devs first and storytellers like sixteenth, so they're excused but the effort is there.

GAMEPLAY | 12/20

There are 3 types of stages in this game. In the first kind, you drive a car through a narrow driving lane and have to move side to side to avoid the edges, to avoid obstacles in front of you that damage you, and destroy/avoid enemy vehicles. This is not that great and there are only two short levels of this kind.

The second type is a side scrolling rail shooter kind of stage that repeats twice as well. You shoot enemies, some close by, some far away, before they shoot you. You pick up items they drop by moving the cursor above the items. You have a few different weapons you can use, some of which have higher AoE damage. It's OK and a nice-to-have change of pace, but I wouldn't say these levels are good. They're tolerable at best.

The third type, finally, is the main kind, 2D platforming with enemies everywhere. You have three weapons at your disposal, two of which need ammo (dynamite, gun). You also have a sword that you can slash your way through levels with. I mostly stuck with the sword. The timing window with your sword is not that long, so I often would be just early or just too late and get hit. It doesn't help that at many points, there are a lot of enemies coming from both angles. Some drop into view out of nowhere sometimes and immediately start shooting, which makes avoiding their shots impossible unless you move forward a step at a time, which would kill the pace and therefore your enjoyment of the game. So just eat those hits and keep moving.

At the end of each level, a meat item drops which regenerates most of your health, so getting hit a bunch of times is not a big issue. So yes, this is not a "one-hit and you die" type of game, thankfully. But it's not a very original game either, at least in terms of its gameplay. In fact, it's very average.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 8/10

No voice acting. Sound design is typical for NES games, so it doesn't stand out. The soundtrack is definitely one of the better ones of all NES games I've played so far, and has some bangers, including the track they've used for many of the cutscenes. The track for Boss Battles 3-2 and 7-3 is also worth a listen.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 4/10

It's very average graphically. It's an NES game, so it's inferior to some of the other games that came out at the time due to the move to 16-bit across the board. Artistically, it still has the ability to stand out but it doesn't. The levels and their artistic design are unimpressive and the kind of enemies that the devs have thrown into each level appears kinda random. You gut red ninjas flying out of the ground, fish too whilst bats come down from above, it just does not feel very thought out in that regard.

ATMOSPHERE | 6/10

The game is described as biopunk and noir. That's a nice mix of themes that you don't see often, and even if the technical limitations hinder the game from delivering a truly intense/atmospheric experience, I appreciate the difference in tone, especially in terms of its story the farther you dive into it. Within the levels, there is plenty of green and black but levels often rather feel like "levels" than actual places. More detail would have helped there.

CONTENT | 7/10

You have 10 levels I believe, all (most?) with multiple stages. 2 of those have you driving, 2 have you on rails. There are boss fights at the end of each level and probably over 10 minutes of storytelling all told. It's a good amount of content.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 6/10

This is mostly a very typical affair. Even though there are some levels where many enemies appear at once, it rarely really leans into the ridiculous like many other games do, even a game such as Ninja Gaiden, because enemies rarely take more than one hit to be defeated and you are such a tank with your own health. There is just one early difficulty spike for one boss that is just so insane that I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of players back in the day didn't manage to beat it. Thanks to the magic of emulators and rewind, I was able to eventually get it down, but man was that ridiculously difficult, especially since almost everything else in this game is very beatable.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 5/10

Innovative in only one thing, and that is its focus on storytelling. The way it tells its story is completely copied from Ninja Gaiden, but let's rather call it 'inspired' and be happy that storytelling is actually happening, something I'm always a big fan of.

The game also features a good soundtrack, but is decidedly average in every other way.

REPLAYABILITY | 2/5

Not really replayable apart from trying to beat your high score. But it's an important game because it leans away from the arcade into a more story-focused experience, which at this time, many games still didn't do. It even gave you a lot of health instead of one hit-point like many other games, so it wasn't too concerned with artificially increasing the play time of this thing either.

PLAYABILITY | 4/5

Playable for the most part. It just has that typical NES slowdown issue whenever 5+ sprites appear on the screen simultaneously. It happens often enough that I deducted a point.

OVERALL | 60 - Average/Slightly Above-Average

Are you looking for something like the early Ninja Gaiden games in terms of storytelling, whilst the game maintained a similar retro style? Well, you don't have the wall jumping here, but other than that, Vice: Project Doom is the best comparison I could find so far. Storytelling is exactly the same, there is some (not a lot) of variety in gameplay and a very good soundtrack here, so give it a try. But don't expect anything special here, as this is one of the most average NES games you'll ever play apart from its storytelling.