Rise Of Nightmares New Pc Games

A bleak dungeon, a couple of top-drawer swear words and a handful of zombies introduce Rise of Nightmares. Then you're crushed by two slabs of moving wall.

As your blood spurts out from between the stone like some over-active human juicer, you realise you're a world away from Kinectimals.

If Child of Eden was considered the first hardcore Kinect game, Rise of Nightmares is probably the first hardcore game with traditional sensibilities. It's all here: zombies, blood and violence. Lots of violence.

It's a game that makes you realise that the hardcore experience is as much down to your elementary movement options as it is your setting. You can walk through corridors in Rise of Nightmares, you can open doors, pick up objects and direct attacks.

It might seem odd that we've reached a point in gaming where basic movement is flagged up specifically in a review - and as a plus point no less - but, in the dancing, petting, exercising world of Kinect, being able to move at will in a reasonably fleshed-out game word is hugely significant.

It all starts off as farce, though. Following the gory prelude you're transported to the more familiar environment of a train darting across Eastern Europe. You take on the role of the game's actual protagonist, Josh, who quickly gets in trouble with the missus for sneaking a hip flask on board. He needn't pay attention: she's about to get kidnapped by a mad scientist.

So, Josh is an alcoholic. Turns out it's a good job as well because - with the train section acting as a tutorial - you soon find walking is harder than playing Heavy Rain with an upside down pad.

The gestures Kinect requires for walking aren't all that bad in isolation. Take a step in front of you to move forward and one backward to go back. Lunging further (not too far mind, think about that recurring groin strain) increases you speed. Turning is done by rotating the shoulders slightly left and right.

And, to begin with, everything works. Unfortunately, problems crop up when all those actions are put together in a room with the undead. It only takes a touch of urgency for things to go to pot.

DEAD MAN WALKING

Like riding a bike for the first time, as you speed up we often made one turn a little too quickly, then overcompensated in the other direction in a panicked attempt to try and maintain our path. Before we knew it , we were snaking at speed without the presence of mind to stop altogether.

You'll end up nose to wall more often than not in Rise of Nightmares, and it very quickly becomes a pain.

Luckily there's a get out. Hold your right hand in the air and the game will carry you through most walking sections. You'll want to use the fall-back within minutes and, in that sense, Rise of Nightmares becomes an on-rails game. Still, it was worth a shot.

Perhaps we're not being fair with such an early dismissal, though, because Sega has been a little bit smart by incentivising you to walk on your own at least some of the time.

The zombies themselves can take quite a battering, there's usually a few of them in each section and you - as a puny living drunk - can only take about three hits before you collapse. You therefore need to arm yourself pretty quickly because fists alone will usually get you killed in-game and have you sweating buckets in real life. The thing is, the scalpels, ice saws, machetes and chainsaws that you can utilise don't exactly scream out their location from afar and using the auto-walk feature will guarantee that you miss them.

We only found this out on our fifth attempt at trying to take on a room full of zombies, dehydrating as we pummelled each one in the face about 30 times only to be scratched to death by another coming in from the side.

Maybe it was because we were ready to kick Kinect against a wall by the time we realised there was a knife waiting in our blind spot, begging to be used if only we'd twist our shoulders just a little, but the weapons themselves do feel really satisfying to use.

While a knife offers vicious and effective stabbing, something larger like a machete or an ice saw can hack limbs and heads off of an encroaching stiff or split them down the middle if you get your angle right.

You can also perform a pretty chunky front kick (although we're not talking Bulletstorm here) by doing one yourself in real life. It doesn't do much damage but gives yourself some breathing space. It proves particularly useful at one point that has giant circular saws whipping across a room as zombies attack. You know what to do.

The action element of Rise of Nightmares does work, then, which means our expectations are exceeded - but once you get over the wonder that this is a real, working action game on Kinect, you realise just how basic a game it is.

We'll forgive the tutorial train section for being utterly boring - you basically walk around opening doors and crouching under a dancing girl's legs because she won't get out of the way (you read that correctly). But the tech - and perhaps developers' apprehension when approaching it - makes it all too easy to make a laborious event out of the most basic game mechanics that would usually be a mere button press away.

To open a door in Rise of Nightmares, for example, you have to hold out your hand to 'Interact' with the handle, wait for the circle to fill in case it was a mistake and then make an opening gesture to actually push the thing.

In total, this probably takes around ten seconds, which is fine at first - but after the third one in as many minutes you start to wonder why opening doors have been made to feel like such a novelty, and such an arduous process.

The game is basic in other design areas, too. You'll often be forced to find a key for a locked door, but it's never too far away. Our first came in a room where the only other object was a dead bloke in a chair. We barely needed to approach him before the Interact prompt popped up allowing Josh to find said key tied around his neck.

If you were offered such a simple solution by any other game you'd eject the disc and put it in a microwave, but in Rise of Nightmares you're quietly relieved because you can't bear the thought of having to actually search for a key with such little command of your legs.

It's hard to blame Sega in that sense, because the simplicity of design here is as much to do with our primitive position in the Kinect timeline as anything else. In a way, such rudimentary level design is a smart move - it's just not very fun.

The action element of Rise of Nightmares does work, then, which means our expectations are exceeded - but once you get over the wonder that this is a real, working action game on Kinect, you realise just how basic a game it is.

We'll forgive the tutorial train section for being utterly boring - you basically walk around opening doors and crouching under a dancing girl's legs because she won't get out of the way (you read that correctly). But the tech - and perhaps developers' apprehension when approaching it - makes it all too easy to make a laborious event out of the most basic game mechanics that would usually be a mere button press away.

To open a door in Rise of Nightmares, for example, you have to hold out your hand to 'Interact' with the handle, wait for the circle to fill in case it was a mistake and then make an opening gesture to actually push the thing.

In total, this probably takes around ten seconds, which is fine at first - but after the third one in as many minutes you start to wonder why opening doors have been made to feel like such a novelty, and such an arduous process.

The game is basic in other design areas, too. You'll often be forced to find a key for a locked door, but it's never too far away. Our first came in a room where the only other object was a dead bloke in a chair. We barely needed to approach him before the Interact prompt popped up allowing Josh to find said key tied around his neck.

If you were offered such a simple solution by any other game you'd eject the disc and put it in a microwave, but in Rise of Nightmares you're quietly relieved because you can't bear the thought of having to actually search for a key with such little command of your legs.

It's hard to blame Sega in that sense, because the simplicity of design here is as much to do with our primitive position in the Kinect timeline as anything else. In a way, such rudimentary level design is a smart move - it's just not very fun.

As a Kinect game it is interesting and, mechanically speaking, actually quite smart. It's just never really that enjoyable.

Ultimately, Rise feels like an experiment, a small first step on the way towards proper action games for Microsoft's motion sensor. It gives you a flavour of what to come and will no doubt kick-start the synapses of other developers who suddenly realise they can take what Sega has done and improve upon it.

For your own curiosity and the occasional giggle that Rise of Nightmares provides, horror fans could consider this a worthwhile rental. But for those holding out for Kinect's truly killer R-rated app, the wait goes on.

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