Malice

Malice
4 years of delays... just for this dumpster fire that should've stayed cancelled.
Protagonist(s): Malice Genre(s): Action Platformer Rating(s): ESRB: T PEGI: 7 Platform(s): Xbox PlayStation 2 Release Date: PAL: April 8, 2004 (PS2) NA: June 2, 2004 PAL: August 6, 2004 (Xbox) Developer(s): Argonaut Games Publisher(s): NA: Mud Duck Productions EU: Evolved Games Country: United Kingdom

Malice is an action platformer developed by British studio Argonaut Games (the same company that made the two Star Fox games on the SNES) and published by Mud Duck Productions in North America, while in Europe, it was published by Evolved Games.

It's one of the last games Argonaut Games has made (along with the Power Drome remake and the console versions of Catwoman: The Game) before finally closing its doors on October 1, 2004. Though, Argonaut Games got finally revived with the remaster of Croc: Legend of the Gobbos this year.

Why It's Malicious

1. Troubled development: The game's troubled development cycle, executive meddling and Argonaut's focus on other projects is the reason for this. The game originally started development for the PlayStation in 1999 with Fox Interactive as publisher and running on the same version of BRender that was used for Croc 2 among other Argonaut titles. After Fox Interactive backed out, Argonaut decided to transition the game to the then-upcoming Xbox to take advantage of its capabilities, leading to most of the existing development being scrapped (including a different story than the one featured in the final game, as well as developed characters) and development slowing down as the company focused more on other projects, especially the Catwoman tie-in game. Soon afterwards, Vivendi Universal/Sierra bought publishing rights in August 2001 and after multiple delays, they backed out of the publishing deal as well; leading to the game being canceled after Argonaut failed to find another publisher for the game.
   • In January 2004, the game was surprisingly revived when Argonaut found two publishers, Mud Duck Productions (for the NA release) and Evolved Games (for the EU release) to help release it. Sadly, when the game finally (though silently) came out, it was an enormous disaster for several reasons below and is the main reason for Argonaut Games going into administration in October 2004.
2. The story is generic, poorly written, and overall feels unfinished through and through. It's about Malice collecting the eight Keys of Logic that she needs to bring to the Metal Guardian to locate and defeat the evil Dog God... and that's it.
3. The game's boxart looks quite ugly and deformed, with Malice's face looking quite appalling for the most part, and there isn't much going on with it aside from a crow and the Dog-God which are very poorly drawn by the way, and it does a bad job at trying to show what the game is about. Overall, it's on-par with the hideous boxarts of the first three Mega-Man games on the NES.
4. Tons of cut content that didn't make it in the final game (such as the morphing abilities of the Clockwork Hammer or the ability to control a giant robot), which gives the impression that the game is rushed.
5. Generic, unappealing character designs, especially Malice herself.
6. Many of the characters themselves are extremely uninteresting and suffer from bad writing and having zero personality aside from their purpose in the game itself, as all of them are just generic video game characters that the already terrible story uses as plot fodder and barely gives them any sort of character development or actual growth since they mostly make terrible jokes and suffer from several character cliches of most other video game characters and unlike most unlikable characters, Malice never grows as a character or acts mature in the slightest, since she still acts like a emo teenager and even at the end, she still has the same bland personality as she did in the rest of the game, thus making her one of the worst main protagonists in video game history.
7. Poor sense of humor due to weak writing. It mostly consists of hammer-related jokes and dated pop-culture references.
8. Boring, repetitive, run-of-the-mill platformer gameplay that doesn't differentiate itself from countless other, more superior platformers that came out before this game. It doesn't help that it has little to no variety throughout, save for the part where you have to go through a level without your hammer.
9. Earth Forest is by far the worst level in the entire game, due to how ridiculously unfair it is since it's extremely platform heavy which wouldn't be a problem if the controls weren't so broken and the jumping actually worked, as it's very easy to miss a lot of platforms or just fall off of them entirely, and the enemy placement itself is just atrocious with the enemies being placed in the worst places imaginable that can be able to kill Malice very easily and cause her to fall for her death to the abyss below, and it also has easily the worst level design in the entire game and some of the projectiles and obstacles can easily overwhelm the player due to how large they are and that they're also unavoidable and tend some strategy to get around them very easily, and overall it suffers from poor programming and the graphics become even worse with a massive overuse of red and orange colors that are so bright that it can obscure the player's view and cause even more cheap deaths to happen, making this level easily one of the worst in video game history.
10. Enemies are laughably easy to kill. You can easily kill them before they even react to your presence.
11. Plot hole: How is Malice a goddess when she's nothing more than a raver girl? This was never explained.
12. No checkpoints in any of the levels, which is a problem due to how big they are, which can make restarting a level after a death very tedious due to how hard the game is, and since half of the game gets bigger in scope with the level design, the game becomes a nightmare during sections that suffer from hard difficulty and are poorly designed with factors made even evident by the terrible controls, which causes the game to become a chore to memorise because of the lack of checkpoints, which is likely why some people haven't even completed the game in it's eternity because of this poor design choice, and is almost Superman 64 levels of bad as a whole.
13. Several in-game crashes that often happen for no reasons, thus causing the player to restart the entire game all over again.
14. Frequent glitches everywhere, such as characters disappearing, enemies being sometimes unkillable, and glitching onto ledges for no reasons at all. There's also a lot of sound and graphical bugs that happen out of nowhere, and even occasional texture pop-in can happen at times too, which could likely indicate that the game was rushed in development as Argonaut Games went out of business after this game's release and it was already in development for 6 years at that point, which explains why the game is so buggy to begin with.
15. Zero save feature, as there isn't any auto-save or manual saving to save the player's progress to prevent them from starting all over again, as due to the game being rushed in development, it was cut, meaning if the player loses all of their lives, they restart the entire game from the beginning, thus making completing the game feel like an absolute nightmare at most.
16. One of the levels is a tedious Escort Mission that is very slow and often takes forever due to poor pacing and the objective being extremely poorly explained and rushed, as the game doesn't help you when try to complete it since it's very linear and it often involves around waiting, which isn't good since it makes the mission's slow pacing even worse, and the enemy AI is so dumb that it's very easy to get around them and ignore them completely, making the mission either way too hard or way too easy at most, and due to it's poor game design and very little objective, it causes Artificial Difficulty to become very rampant during this part of the game and can result in some ragequits at times too.
17. Many of the spells are useless and do very little damage nor do they help Malice be able to handle the enemies with complete ease, as they are very poorly-programmed and suffer from missed potential.
    • The Damage Boosting Spell boosts the amount of damage you do to enemies, but it rarely works at times and tends to feel gimmicky and atrociously glitchy at times.
    • The Shield Spell prevents the player from being hurt by bullets, but that's about it as it doesn't prevent them from getting hurt by any other attack aside from the bullets, and for the most part it isn't fun to use really.
    • The Time Spell makes the game's pacing even worse and is very finnicky to use overall.
    • The Glide Spell is easily the worst one yet since all it does is give the player a slow gliding move that is meant to heal the player, but it has very little invincibly frames and can easily be cancelled out in just a few seconds, making it very trivial in comparison to other weapons in the game.
18. Awful voice acting. An example of this is Malice, who sounds very ditzy.
    • Sometimes, you can even hear the script pages being flipped.
    • When Malice increases her health bar, she makes some sexually suggestive-sounding moans, which comes off as inappropriate for a PEGI 7 rating.
    • What's more, as mentioned in WIM#1, the members of No Doubt (Stefani included) were originally going to be voice actors for the game's characters, but that fell through during development.
19. Incredibly short as you can beat the game in 5 hours straight.
20. Long load times, which last around 20 to 35 per seconds that last even longer on the PlayStation 2 version of the game itself.
21. Awkward camera, since it's painful to control and can get stuck in corners very easily, and can even cause some cheap deaths at times when platforming or fighting enemies themselves, thus making the game feel either cheap or cryptic at times.
22. Poor level design, as many of the levels themselves are huge and empty with several linear paths and tons of invisible walls scattered all over the place, and some parts of the levels themselves are just straight-up unfinished or aren't even done properly, which results in the game becoming confusing to travel around and difficult to complete at times too. In fact, a few levels are so small and boxed-in that it can make dealing with enemies very painful and annoying, and this is apparent with some of the missions in the game itself, and it feels worse every time whenever the game's difficulty ramps up and can cause some players to ragequit.
23. The game has an awful combat system that utilizes Malice's hammer to be able to hit a lot of the enemies themselves and the hammer itself can be powered-up with spells and other kinds of upgrades to be able to deal more damage. However, the problem with the hammer itself is that it is extremely difficult to handle and is overall very weak and underpowered since it deals very little damage to most enemies and even when upgraded, the hammer itself is still pretty much useless and controls horribly overall with wonky character animations and bad collision detection that is very glitchy and doesn't even damage most enemies at times and it makes Malice very vulnerable and easy to knock out, making the game even more frustrating and annoying and this is mostly with the stronger enemies in the game itself.
24. Extremely easy bosses, as all of them have predictable attack patterns that are easy to dodge and can be stopped very easily with Malice's hammer, mostly due to their pathetic AI that is very easy to get around and take advantage of due to how pathetic most of them are, and some of them rarely tend to attack at all and just move around the arena, thus making them a complete joke and easy to take care of as a whole.
    • However, they also drag on for way too long, due to many of them having massive amounts of Health and the extremely slow pacing of the game itself, thus making them extremely boring and bland too.
25. The controls are downright abysmal and sluggish, since Malice moves extremely slow and jumping tends to fail at times thus causing cheap deaths, and her physics are very floaty in general due to poor programming, making the game feel very finnicky at times to play.
26. It features a bland minigame that mostly has Malice collecting a bunch of coins across four different worlds, and it is very easy and can be completed immediately in a few minutes, and is the only bit of post-game content in the actual game itself which isn't good since it even makes the game a far worse experience than it already is and doesn't give it a timeless feel like most games during the sixth generation of consoles, and thus results in it being a generally forgettable 3D platformer with bad controls and poor programming overall.
27. Lack of originality. The game feels rather bland in comparison to other 3D platformers released around that time, as many of them had a unique gimmick that made them stand out and gave the game a level of charm to it that is lacking in most modern games nowadays, and some of them like Psychonauts and Voodoo Vince have become cult classics. This game on the other hand isn't like that, as it feels like another bog-standard platformer with nothing new and even Malice's hammer weapon doesn't make the game any different from any other platformer at that time, as it suffers from the same problem as most of the other 3D platformers that Argonaut have made in that they feel outdated and the 3D level design in this game feels very out of date since it has the same design philosophy as late 90s 3D platformers that haven't aged well, and since the game was originally a PS1 title that started development back in 1998 by the way, it caused this game to already feel primitive by the time it was released, which is likely a reason why it become forgotten very easily and is never talked about by mainstream video game YouTube reviewers in the slightest, as only more smaller and obscure reviewers have talked about the game in retrospective and not for positive reasons however, making the game a relic of the mid 2000s at best.
28. The game doesn't even have any post-game content, since after it's completed 100%, all the player can do is just replay the game all over again at the start, and there aren't any credits either since it's all shown on a book instead, which is cheap and shows signs of laziness from the developers themselves.
    • In fact, content-wise overall, there isn't much and only the main game itself is what it has, thus causing the game to have zero replay value.
29. Ugly, muddy graphics, especially on the PS2 version. However, the Xbox version looks better due to texture bump mapping.
    • Heck, even games on the PS2 (such as Sly Cooper and the Thievious Raccoonus, Ratchet & Clank, Jak & Daxter, etc.) and the Xbox (Halo: Combat Evolved, Blinx the Time Sweeper, Panzer Dragoon Orta, etc.) that came out before look a lot better than this game.
30. Mediocre, clichéd music.
    • Equally baffling is that No Doubt would be doing the music for this game, but it ended up in the same reason as WIM#15.3.
31. Overall, this game (along with the atrocious Catwoman: The Game) is the final nail to the coffin for Argonaut Games as the company went out of business as mentioned before. Until 2024 when Argonaut Games was revived with the remaster of the first Croc game.

The Only Redeeming Quality

1. The graphics in the pre-release version look gorgeous, especially on the Xbox since that console has stronger hardware than the PS2, despite what's mentioned in WIM#29.

Reception

The game received mixed to negative reviews by critics, with a score of 51/100 or the PS2 version and a score of 48/100 for the Xbox version on Metacritic.

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