Virus: It is Aware
| Virus: It is Aware | ||||||||||||
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 Is this game even aware that it is him the true virus ?
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""No kidding, on the 3 dozens of people that were making this game, I'm sure at least 20 of them were working on the intro cinematic, 8 making a magnificent game over screen, and 2 busting their butts make the rest of the game in its entierity.""
— Joueur du Grenier
Virus: It is Aware is an action-horror video game released in 1999 exclusively in Europe for the PlayStation and developed and published by Cryo Interactive. It is a tie-in to the 1999 comic book film Virus.
Plot
Loosely based on the film, the game is about an alien electrical life-form (usually referred to as "the Evil") which hijacks a space station, beams itself down to a ship called The Electra, and plans to take over the world. To do so, it killed the ship crew and outfitted them with implants to infiltrate the human race. Unlike in the film, the ship makes it to port and the cyborg monsters infest the "Nakomi hotel". A female police officer and specialist in criminology, Joan Averil, is sent in to investigate "strange events" along with her partner Sutter. They discover the monsters and fight their way through, rescuing two civilians on the way. Yakuza criminals also appear as enemies on the way. As reports of strange activity on The Electra surfaces, they track the infestation down to the ship and board it. Joan reveals that her brother Thomas works on the ship, and hopes to find him. They do, but Sutter is wounded, and presumably killed. They eventually manage to blow up the ship and escape. The ending cinematic ominously zooms out to depict the infested space station.
Why It Should Be Aware of Itself
- The enemies never leave you alone. Every time you enter a new room crowds of them will pop in and out of nowhere to attack you, which make the game incredibly annoying to play.
- Unacceptably short, the game only last 1 hour, but even then it will probably last longer because of how horribly hard this game is.
- Unfairly difficult. As stated above, the enemies never leave you alone and most of them take mere seconds to dispose of you. There are no checkpoints and save states, so this probably was done to hide how short the game is, this is also similar to X2: Wolverine Revenge (which howewer came out 4 years later), but here it is even worse than that game.
- Not to mention that it doesn't had any checkpoints in the levels, which mean that if you die, you need to not only restart the entire level but also had to insert the passwords, which take a long time and considering that you will probably due a lot, you will lose a lot of times.
- Extremely linear gameplay. All you do in the entire game is walk from corridor to corridor, kill plenty of enemies every time you change room, and sometimes have to protect an NPC or avoid an instant-death trap.
- Atrocious controls, they are extremely stiff and unresponsive and this is even to the point of making the game even more unplayable and harder than it's already is, nd because of that, there's absolutely nothing fun in this awful game.
- Gruesome, yet awful graphics, since the characters models are very horrible to look at and are so blocky that it barely even qualify for a PS1 game, not even mention that the colors are also atrocious and ugly as hell, even for PS1 standards, games such as Rayman 2: The Great Escape and Crash Bandicoot: Warped look much better than this and we're released in the same years.
- Terrible soundtrack that is just downright annoying, especially at the last level where it become unbearable.
- Awful hit-detection that always fail to hit enemies and the collision is extremely small, making it hard to hit enemies.
- Long load times that are on par with Mega Man X7 and Sonic '06, and last horribly long.
- The storyline is full of plot holes. For example, you will find some Yakuza bandits as human enemies in the hotel, and there is no explanation whatsoever about how they ended up there or what they were doing.
- The story is also completely different and to be honest, the story is absolutely bad and feel like it was written by a 5 years old kid, the cutscenes text show it.
- The game characters are also lifeless and act like they are not in danger at all. There is even a woman named Emma that dies shortly after her debut. She is so pointless to the plotline that she was clearly created just to die when introducing one of the bosses.
- Atrocious combats that is so bad that it feel like it wanted to be even worse than Bubsy 3D controls (in which it is almost even worse than that game), and there's nothing to do with it since you just mash the buttons with the hope to win and that it.
- The sound effects are absolutely horrible and are even more unbearable than the music itself since not only they are loud but also they sound just downright annoying and painful to heard, even worse you heard them every single seconds, in which it NEVER SHUT UP!!
- The game itself is so lifeless that it feel like the game was probably made to be a big cash grab just to make money, or even they might have designed it with no care, and as said by Joueurs du Grenier himself, they probably wanted to finish to design the game quickly to go home and that the game would never selling, in which it likely didn't did well because of how obscure the game is.
Redeeming Qualities
- The CGI cutscenes and the game over screen are well done, even if the game over is slighly disturbing because of the awful music playing.
- It is possible to use GameShark codes to balance the difficulty, but the game still has no replay values at all and play just as horribly.
Reception
Jeuxvideo.com gave the beta version of the game an 8 out of 20, criticizing the very poor handling of the character, the ugly graphics, bad music, and technical shortcomings, and stating that "Virus is far, very far from being finished. The final version just came out. I really hope it has been redesigned from the ground up for nothing portends a good game."
However, when the game was released, the issues were unchanged, and the game was received poorly. It has since then fallen into obscurity.