Act of Terror: Season 1

Name: Act of Terror: Season 1

Developer: freezing_rain

Story: "24" fan game. This is based on the television show, "24". You are Agent Jack Bauer, and you have to stop a group of terrorists from releasing nerve gas.

Writing: The dialogue is as cheesy and ridiculous as you'd expect. It is kind of unbelievable that when a federal agent tells people to stand aside, they'd have to think about it for a second. It's plainly ridiculous that when a federal agent tells you that deadly nerve toxin is about to be released in your building, you'd stand there talking about it. It's a well constructed story with good plotting and pacing. It tries to be like the show and does a reasonably passable job of it. But the dialogue needs a bit of help. As to whether Jack would cut a man's hand off to get information...having seen the show (it's not to my taste)...yeah, I can believe that.



Gameplay: Very fast paced, but controls are really awful. The game uses an onscreen combat script that let's you fight enemies on the map. You can press A for melee attacks and B to fire your gun. Melee attack is virtually useless. It is based on the VX tile position, so simply standing on a tile next to the enemy makes you take damage, and you have to be standing on the tile next to the enemy in order to attack. The gun is slightly more useful as it will take down a target much faster, but it's ridiculously cumbersome to use because the running speed of all of the characters is really high, and they run at you way too fast for the gun to be much help. Every scene is on a timer so there's always a sense of urgency. Car chases are just stupid. Ramming the suspect car doesn't damage either car, but hitting a bystander car stops you cold. Again with the timer. Even with the suspect car on the screen, if the timer runs out, you loose it, which is absolutely absurd. Then both vehicles move at the exact same speed without variation so there's no way to catch it without trying to short cut each turn. The pacing is good, but the gameplay desperately needs to be adjusted. It is terrible. I wouldn't be surprised if the dev simply dumped the script into the program, turned on the features and just forgot it without giving a second thought to the settings. So many people do that, and it just ends up making your gameplay terrible, because just turning on features is NOT making sure your script settings are adjusted right, and in this game, they're REALLY not.

Graphics: Basic RTP. The dev does a good job mapping. I'd say the locations are a bit too big, but that's probably to make the timed search quests challenging. The sprites are from the character generator, but the dev has the good sense not to use the facechips. At least the car chases aren't RTP.