Malice is a game that many of you probably never heard of, and for good reason. It was meant to be one of the launch titles for the original X-box that wasn’t Halo. I picked it up because I was bored and it was three bucks at the local Gamestop.
For the less virtual-aware, those are bad signs.
The game is an attempt to capture a slightly younger audience with a platformer starring a spunky, sassy goddess fighting funky, silly foes. Keyword: attempt. The plot of the game is as follows; Dog God starts a conquest of the universe, starting with Malice’s world. Malice gets her head bitten off, and since Gods can’t go to the Afterlife, Death makes her go back and fix the mess she made. The Metal Guardian, the force of Order in the universe, sends her to go retrieve ‘Logic Keys’ to unlock parts of his ‘Machineries’ so he can track down Dog God so Malice can defeat him and save the day. If you’re looking for plot twists, there aren’t any.
Even after five years in development, Malice’s visuals are only so-so. The Xbox is supposed to have the best visuals, but all I really noticed while playing the game is that some things are much, much shinier than they should be. Besides Malice and her giant hammer, nothing in the game really caught my eyes.
Malice herself comes off less as a goddess but more of a brat. Even if she were an ordinary girl attempting to make a genuinely funny satire of epic quests and video game logic, she’d still be annoying. Her main purpose is to swing a large hammer and shoot off half-hearted snarks. I kept looking for something to make me root for her, but besides novelty of a chibi girl with a big hammer and an angry remark about taking bullets in a tee-shirt, I really couldn’t.
The other characters aren’t much better. While they are meant to be comically helpless and quirky, they come off as rather annoying. The Metal Guardian could be a butler on the side, and Dog God is a dropout from the Cobra Commander School of Villany. Bowser has a better personality than this guy. The only slightly humorous boss there was is the skeletal Juju shaman with a ridiculous Elvis voice. Rarely will you speak to a side character again after you complete their level, something you’re thankful for.
The controls are simple, and they work well. I didn’t find any glaring problems with them. You can double jump, and have and can swing your hammer in a rather wide arc in front of you very quickly, or perform a slower ground pound that deals double damage and a very small shockwave effect. The jumps have a kind of moonwalk physics to them, which is a little awkward until you realize the first spell you get is the float spell, which makes accurate landings, well, a breeze. Magic spells are activated by holding the right trigger and pressing the appropriate face button. Once again, very simple; the spell types are even color-coded to match the X-box’s buttons. You get some cool magical abilities: speed, freeze time, rage, nuke, bullet shield, invincibility, glide, and heal. However, they’re only necessary to use immediately after you get them, with the possible exception of bullet shield (which I used primarily to keep from being knocked into the abyss while platforming). The game is so easy that it seems almost unfair to use them in normal combat.
Every level consists of jumping over pits, finding switches, keys or other doohickeys that will open a door, and smacking every enemy you find into the ground with your large hammer. Seriously, that’s it. Every level is just a scavenger hunt in an obstacle course. I was able to beat the game in about five hours; even novice gamers should be able to beat this game easily. There aren’t even that many different kinds of enemies; they ether run up to you and try to smack you, in which case smack them away with ease, or they try to shoot you from a distance, in which case you dodge their shots until they need to reload, then run up and plant the business end of your hammer into their heads. They also always drop health, so even pitched battles never leave you too worried about the next encounter. The enemies are only threatening in the early parts of the game. After a few health upgrades, they become mere annoyances. The bosses aren’t much better, usually consisting of dodge attacks, run up and hit them when they get tired.
At the end of Malice, I was feeling extremely disappointed. Only the completionist in me and the game’s easy difficulty made me finish this game, and I only played it again to make this review. I’d say you might want to rent it if you like cheesy stuff, but nobody has it on the shelves and it’d be cheaper to buy it. Unless you’re making a collection of bad games, it isn’t worth it. In the end, you get what you pay for: Three bucks for five hours with a big hammer.
Thanks for reading!
For my next article: Video Game Necromancy: Digging up what should have been!
