kill.switch

Sam blasts his way onto the virtual battlefield in this well-honed shooter...

More Images

Finding good cover is the first instinct of any human being when someone starts shooting at them. For the infantry soldier good knowledge of what makes the best cover is the best weapon that they have when it comes to surviving a firefight. The finest weapons and communications are powerless to stop a bullet, whereas a simple concrete wall or ditch does a great job of intercepting a round before it can pass through the flesh of the trooper. So if cover is so vitally important to a soldier then how comes it has never made much of an impact in shooting games? Sure, you can duck behind crates and sometimes even peer round corners, but generally speaking the active use of cover has not been an aspect that designers have paid much attention to. It wasn't until kill.switch arrived through my letterbox that I have ever been able to press up tight against a wall, tentatively edge closer to its corner and then stick my gun round the bend and blindly fire off at the baddies.

kill.switch is also unusual in that it has an interesting plot, one where almost everything about the back-story and the reasons for your involvement starts as an unknown and is gradually revealed as the game progresses. It's been a while since my desire to find out more of the plot has driven me forward even more than a wish to get a bigger gun or play on a new level. You are Bishop, a super-soldier of the near future who is under the complete control of an operator sat back at base. He controls Bishop over a neural link, with each mission opening up with a little snippet of cutscene as some unknown party tries to hack into the neural link. As the game starts it appears that Bishop's memory has been blanked, so as the game develops you are treated to little flashbacks of a beautiful woman, presumably someone Bishop once knew quite well (nudge, nudge). While it initially reminded me of Robocop and Murphy's journey to get back control of his own mind it is also a post-modern kind of game where the player directs the actions of a game character who, in the game, is being directed by an operator who remarks, 'this is like playing a video game'. Fortunately kill.switch doesn't disappear up its own arse with this conceit, but it is a nice touch and stimulates the mind a little bit. kill.switch is also devoid of lengthy superfluous cutscenes. They tend to be economic and to the point, although what this point is will evade you till the later stages of the game. Saying that, one of the cutscenes, a Matrix style slow-mo firefight, ranks among the very best I have ever seen and is almost worth the admission price on its own.

The plan is simple enough. You have to make your way through each of the six levels, blasting everything in sight. Any namby-pamby ideas of stealth are quickly discarded in a hail of gunfire. kill.switch is an unashamed blaster where there's not a single person in the entire game that you aren't meant to shoot to death. The controls take some getting used to and getting your head round the utter devotion to the concept of cover that you will need to survive in the game takes a while. There's a brief but concise tutorial that will tell you how to do things. The controls can be awkward at first, but after a few levels you'll be ducking and diving with more agility than a political press officer. Once it's all in place you can sit back and enjoy the spectacle. It may not be the longest game in the world (I took about 8-9 hours on normal level, somewhat extended because of a save game getting overwritten) but the idea of going back over the whole game for another go is totally plausible as kill.switch provides such an enjoyable romp.

Bishop gets to play with some fun guns, with a heavy machine gun, a grenade launcher, some rifles and sub-machine guns along with the obligatory sniper rifle all making an appearance. The sub-machine guns are two too many in my opinion, as there's no noticeable difference between their effects and they get in the way when you want to cycle through your weapons in a hurry. Handily, guns get discarded when you run out of ammo for them so you can ditch what you don't want by emptying their clips, but as all the weapons look very similar when they are dropped you'll no doubt soon pick another one up at some point. The weapons are restricted to specific levels. This and a shortage of ammo ensure that you can't just hold back and abuse the sniper rifle. Each weapon can be fired down the barrel which both improves aiming and enlarges the view of the target, but often you will have to make do with the 3rd person view or even blindfire as the amount of lead flying around makes measured aiming very risky indeed. There's no scope bob, which seems somewhat wrong these days, but the view down the barrels of the various weapons is great, with some nice blurring of the foregrounds in the view. There are also four different types of hand grenade to play with, but you don't get any cool Sam fisher-style gadgets to tinker with as they would just slow the pace down.