Gore (PC)
By Susie Vee

With a name like Gore, you’d think that this game would at least have an over-the-top sense of humor. A game with a name like that is clearly limiting its audience from the start, so it might as well try and live up to the audacity of its title.

Sadly, Gore is really more of a bore than anything else. It’s not particularly salacious, especially in a year that’s seen such truly gory games as Soldier of Fortune II and Eternal Darkness. Combined with the distinctly ghetto flavor of everything from the graphics to the plot, you’re left underwhelmed, even for a mid-price product.

Budget titles can be good – just take a look at the Serious Sam series. But Gore looks and plays like a TV movie-of-the-week knockoff of more traditional big screen fare. The graphics are blocky and unoriginal, and the controls seem stiff and unresponsive when compared to today’s current crop of shooters.

If it were released three years ago, Gore might have made a good run-n-gun shooter, but today everything about it looks and feels dated.

We really wanted to like Gore, especially since it’s the game equivalent of an indie movie, developed by a small dev house called 4D Rulers. Too bad they seem to have been in over their heads – or at least a few years too late bringing their game to market.

That said, if you’ve got an older PC, Gore has modest system requirements, the listed minimum system being a PII 350 (although we’d be scared to try anything less than a 500). This makes it a good choice for multiplayer gaming as well, if your PC can’t push the pixels like it should. Gore was apparently developed with online play as a major focus, although with a small user base, it’ll probably never be a mainstream choice.

SCORE: 5.0