Codename: Outbreak (PC)
Reviewed by Jenni Miller

I am immediately skeptical of any game advertised as a bargain. Codename: Outbreak is part of Virgin Interactive's "Anytime Anywhere 20 Bucks" campaign. The cheapness factor and the large Virgin Interactive seal was foreboding, but it wasn't until I realized there was no instruction manual that I began to question my fortitude and life direction in general. Because from then on, I knew this was gonna be a stinker.

Boy, was I right. I gave Codename: Outbreak at least an hour -- an hour of fumbling around in the woods in some supposedly-futuristic "decimated" Earth that really just looked boring, occasionally shooting at errant soldiers or policemen and rummaging around dead bodies. My other teammate was kind of out of it; sometimes he followed me, sometimes not. When I found a doctor who was our witness to what spookiness had occurred on this ever-so-decimated Earth, he was prone to doing deep-knee bends as opposed to following his captors like a good hostage should.

Factor in a vague storyline hinted at by the decent intro movie and an interface that should either have been easily deciphered (or have come with a damn instruction book), and you have one bored gamegrrl. No maps. No way of figuring out where I was supposed to take the hostage or which buildings were the ones my invisible leader was directing me toward. It just didn't make any sense.

It is possible to make a cheap and fun game for low-end machines. Serious Sam was 20 bucks and featured a veritable bloodbath of FPS nonsense that would warm the cockles of any submachine-gun-totin' chickadee. But Codename: Outbreak, my friends, is an affront to humanity. It's a rip-off of the Predator movies, as the bad evil nono-monster inhabiting the earth (and eventually scampering out of a Little Shop of Horrors-eque plant in the form of what looked like a pissed-off grasshopper) apparently had some crazy heat-motion sensors and a yen for nibbling on soldiers. There was some crap about genetic experiements gone awry, but I was too bored to pay attention. I was hoping there would at least be some monkeys, like in Outbreak the movie, but all I got was a bunch of angry insects biting people, infecting them and killing them with nary a squirt of blood. Also, I noticed a typo, and folks, it ain't that hard to spell "cigarettes."

While the intro was fair enough in the graphics department, the rest of the game looked like shredded wheat in varying shades of drab. Factor in a sub-mediocre AI and an unintelligible interface (and certainly not intuitive enough since there was no, I repeat, no instruction manual), and you've got a snoozer.

Turn it off. Pick up Serious Sam if you're that frigging cheap or if your specs are that bad. However, do your sanity and your boredom a favor and spend the extra cash on a decent game. Sometimes you really do get what you pay for.

SCORE: 5.0