Bruce Willis stars in this PlayStation twin-stick shooter gem.
What Is It? The year is 1998, 3D video games have become the norm with the PlayStation and N64 in full swing. You are a video game publisher, what is your move to capitalize on all of the money now flowing through the video game industry? You enlist Bruce Willis to perform some motion capture, record a short script, and about forty quips. I would typically make a snarky comment here, but that’s honestly not a bad plan at all!
Apocalypse is a third person shooter. I will refer to it as a twin-stick shooter through this review, but I should note that the game does support the non-analog PS1 controller by replacing the right-stick firing with each face button firing in a different direction. If you don’t have an analog controller, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you stay away from this game.
You control Bruce and blast through hordes of enemies. There is a barely existent story about four horsemen, an evil scientist, and a corrupt president. It is told through short cutscenes between levels and is mostly ignorable. Your mission, however, is clear from the start; destroy everything.
A weak machine gun is the default weapon but there are a handful of powerups to be found as you play. The back L2 shoulder button cycles through your weapons while the right stick fires in whatever direction you press. The machine gun gets unlimited ammo while the rest all run out fairly quickly until you can find a new upgrade. R2 fires off a massive bomb which clears any common enemy off of the screen.
Being a twin-stick shooter, you can expect enemies to come at you from all directions. The game also uses a bit of verticality that is a bit unique to the mechanic. It, and non-vertical shooting, feature a bit of auto-aiming help which is a wise decision because it can be really tough to exactly fire at a very small enemy and you’ll need to be doing that quite frequently. The net result is a very fun shooting mechanic. You run and blast your way through everything fairly easily, with the only really difficult obstacles being some very powerful late game enemies and platforming sections.
Speaking of which, the game does feature a bit of platforming. Using R1 to jump is a bit strange at first, but ultimately works just fine once you get used to it. The movement and jumping controls are fluid and smooth, unlike many games of the era. This means the platforming mostly works, but the game is still at its best when it isn’t trying to make you perform precision jumps while blasting away enemies.
The game features eleven levels, seven of which are linear levels you simply need to blast your way through and occasionally defeat a small boss at the end. Each of these feature a few checkpoints and take roughly in the 10-20 minute range. The other levels are boss fights, those aforementioned horsemen, which are fun. The game and bossfights start out incredibly simple but grow over the course of the game. The game rarely approaches extreme difficulty, at least on normal mode, but there are a few parts near the end which took me quite a few continues to get through. The full game can be completed in three or four hours, there isn’t much in the way of replayability other than trying harder difficulty levels.
The Best Part: The 3D twin-stick shooting is great. I’m mostly used to a 2D twin-stick shooter as any sort of verticality can easily mess up the entire system, but Apocalypse pulls it off with some smart auto-aim which will fire at things reasonable above or below you as long as you’re pointing in their general direction. Running through, blasting away enemies with a fun variety of weapons from rockets to grenades, homing missiles, and more is a good time.
The Worst Part: For the first two-thirds of the game, or so, I was impressed with the game’s constraint by not throwing difficult, precise platforming sections as you. Most of the levels keep shooting as the focus while sprinkling in some light platforming along the way. This mix worked really well for me. Later on, however, the game begins folding in some really precise jumps. It rarely approaches a frustrating level, but I thought the game was a bit better when the platforming was a bit lighter.
The Verdict: Apocalypse is a really great time. There are many, many original PlayStation games, some of which I absolutely adore, that require a gigantic preface of “if you can handle the control and/or camera jank, you might like this…” Apocalypse is a rare game on the console featuring controls with a more modern feel that absolutely holds up. Being a twin-stick shooter, the movement is naturally a bit simpler, but mostly it’s just nice to not have tank controls here.
It is far from a perfect game, with the occasional reliance on precision platforming and mostly clunky visuals being two obvious downsides. However, the good far outweighs the bad.
Controlling virtual Bruce Willis for a few hours, hearing him fire off quip after quip, is a fun time. The controls, weapons, enemies, and boss fights ensure that the game is worth playing beyond its movie star headliner.
How to Play: PlayStation
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