Mortyr 2093-1944

Snap215_1Revisiting the past in more ways than one.

Getting Mortyr to run was a huge hassle. The installation wizard looks for its data on the first physical CD drive, so if you’re running it from a virtual disc then tough luck – you can’t install the game, or at least not without shifting some drive letters first. After I did manage to install it the game kept crashing upon skipping the intro movie, with no error message this time. Some minutes of fidgeting later and I finally got it running. And the prize?

Unterwhelming

Basically a Doom clone with Nazis traded in for hellspawn, or perhaps even Wolfenstein rendered in genuine 3D, Mortyr sets out to copy the basic formula that kickstarted the first-person shooter genre way back in the early 90s. You go about linear levels blasting hot lead left and right, finding keys and unlocking doors. You can snipe Nazis with your Mauser, perforate Nazis with your MP-40 submachine gun, and toast Nazis with your flame thrower. All that’s missing are the cries of “Mein Leiben!”

The main twist here is that you get to fight the Nazis in both past and future. After spending eleven levels in 1944, you make a quick jump to the future where the remaining eighteen levels of the game take place – which brings up a major gripe of mine. I was just starting to warm up to the World War Two setting of Mortyr when I suddenly found myself in a very gaudy-looking Nazi-occupied world of the future. Everything goes seriously downhill from here – the future looks decidedly tacky. Neon lights abound, and the bad guys just look silly.

Snap268_1But this game showed problems well before I got to the future. The action never quite clicks. The AI is dirt stupid. Enemies do little more than charge at you. The crosshairs for your weapon are inaccurate (I found that it hits low and to the right of where you’re actually aiming), and the character models don’t look nearly as good as those from Half-Life or Unreal. The sound is mediocre, and the music awful. Visually the game looks pretty good for its time, but really nowhere on par with the competition. In one sentence this is merely a so-so remake of Wolfenstein, and what you see is pretty much what you get.


System Requirements: PII 266 Mhz, 64 MB RAM, 3D Card, Windows 95


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