by jason - July 31, 2005

Its 2083, and the world, is a much different place than the one we�re living in now. Into this world torn by the rivalry between massive corporations come four different �freelancers� (aka mercenaries) who are trying to make their respective ways in the world, etc. You�ve got Johnson, who bears a striking resemblance to Neo of Matrix fame, Kenji the Yakuza, Victoria, a woman with psionic powers, and Jessica, the hacker. The four different characters spend much of their time doing the exact same thing�over, and over, and over again. Run through terrain, kill everything that attacks you, rinse and repeat. With such redundant gameplay, it almost makes me resent the time it took me to get this game up and running - but more on that later.

There�s not too much �gameplay� really required with Restricted Area. Run around, kill mutants, robots, people, all of which die too easily, gain experience, pick up armor in the form of cyber arms, legs, skin, hearts, even brains, or various bio-engineered appendages of the same design. While this was cool at first, the novelty kind of wore off after awhile, and for unexplained reasons, some pieces didn�t work with other pieces, and that just became annoying. On the bright side, selling the various body parts gave you a ton of money you could use to upgrade your weapons to causing ridiculous amounts of pain.

It's a 10-footer.

Restricted Area doesn�t look bad, exactly - it�s just not to the level of quality I�d expect from computer games these days. Since the top-down perspective is a little far away from the action, they�ve included a zoom feature to check out all the gory details. It�s pretty useless, though, since when you zoom in, the game becomes a jagged, pixilated mess. From a the normal view, though, things look considerably better, despite a lack of variation. I think all the corporations adopted the same design for their bases and factories to cut costs somewhere, because I didn�t notice many (if any) difference between the different places I traveled. The mutants looked decent, nothing too inspired though, and there were definitely too few variants between them to actually catch your eye. Needless to say, the overall judgment on graphics is good, but nothing mind-blowing. Like I said, a ten-footer: from 10 feet, it looks pretty good. up close, the flaws come out.

So solly, sairor. (Voice Acting 101)

At least the folks in the sound department didn�t fall asleep at the switch. Everything sounds like it should, and I had no problem holding down the trigger on the machine gun and letting it chatter happily away while chewing holes in whatever was unlucky enough to be in front of me. With regards to soundtrack, I could do without the generic techno, thanks, but I�ve heard a lot worse in games. The people responsible for voice-acting should be drug out in the street and hit with a flamethrower, and have their remains left for mutants. What they were thinking when they let this game leave with such horrible voice acting, is simply beyond my comprehension.

In the fun department�the game is waaay too short. Due to time constraints, I only managed to run through the game with two of the four characters, but there weren�t really enough differences to make me want to play through the other two characters anyways. The final �boss� as it were, was simply, no challenge, as a few seconds with my flamethrower rendered him a style of Extra Crispy usually reserved for KFC�.

So, we have a decent looking repetitive action game without much replay value. To any readers still interested should be warned that it took quite a considerable effort just to get the darned thing running. Upon installation, we were greeted with a request for a cd key - no problem, right? Well, it wouldn�t have been if they had included the cd key with the packaging. To make a bad situation worse, we know it wasn�t just our review copy - a simple Google search revealed that a fair number of other players encountered the same problem, requiring you to contact the developer and get a key directly or exchange it where it was purchased for a copy which (hopefully) has a key. It�s one thing to ship a game with a few bugs that can be patched - it�s obnoxious, but forgivable. But to ship it without the serial keys?

Well, they tried. Of course, the exclusion of the key makes the game a bit of a truly "restricted area" - an issue that will hopefully be fixed for future shipments or pressings. The game itself, however, is nothing to write home about, but if you're sick of Diablo 2 and must have an action-RPG, then this rather short, slightly repetitive game with decent graphics sound and almost comically horrible voice acting (listen to the Japanese guy and tell me you didn�t laugh. I dare you.) might very well satisfy your craving.