ABOMINATION: THE NEMESIS PROJECT - Games - http://maxpages.com/strategyforum/Abomination_The_Nemesis

OVERALL: 80%

The place is America, the time is now. In the space of 72 hours, a virulent plague has swept across the States, destroying 90 per cent of the population and turning the major cities into ghost towns. But a few survivors remain, many of whom are now in the thrall of a mysterious cult called The Faithful. Somehow, the followers of this cult have remained untouched by the disease, but there is something not entirely savoury about them, or their sinister religion.

Abomination: The Nemesis Project puts you in control of a small group of survivors, plus an experimental military unit consisting of eight genetically engineered soldiers who each have a special skill, ranging from extreme strength to the ability to make an explosive device out of just about anything.

At the start of the game you are told to investigate a Faithful stronghold in the city, but beyond that, you're ignorant of much that is going on. It is only by playing through a series of missions that you will begin to discover exactly how The Faithful are linked to the epidemic, and its even more frightening cause.

Abomination: The Nemesis Project is a team-based tactical combat game, something along the lines of Bullfrog's legendary Syndicate and MicroProse's X-COM series. Any resemblance to the latter is unsurprising, given that several of the Hothouse team worked on the X-COM games, but as project manager Steve Goss admits, it is 'closer to Syndicate', in terms of style, since it is in essence a real-time game.

The game's structure is intriguing. Rather than putting you through a number of missions, the game uses a random generation system so that cities and missions are created on the fly, and different players will have totally different experiences in their respective games. You are not obliged to undertake every mission that comes your way but can leave them until later or ignore them altogether. However, there are several objectives that you must complete to finish the game, and these will continue to crop up in missions until you get them out of the way. The game is also clever in that it continually adapts itself to your achievements. There are many indirect ways of attacking your enemies, for example, that you can only discover through playing the game, and sufficient variables to ensure that there will always be more than one route around a problem. Thus you can fail missions, or even ignore them altogether, without ever getting well and truly stuck.

Visually, the game does bear a passing resemblance to Syndicate with its 3D isometric world. As with that game, you cannot rotate the landscape so it is possible to hide inside buildings and ambush your enemies from within. The crisp, clear graphics form a backdrop for the unimaginable horrors you will face hideously diseased zombies which have sprung from the same source as the disease, and worse... As the plot progresses you discover that something huge and terrifying is behind the troubles, something which is spewing gross organic structures up through the pavements and cannibalising everything from cars to corpses. The gross-out factor will ensure the game is not for children Hothouse is hoping for a 15 certificate but the dismembered bodies and flying limbs which your weapons leave behind could make this problematic.

Abomination also offers a host of multiplayer options, including teamplay, where you team up against the enemy; Capture The Flag; deathmatch; lone runner in which everyone gangs up against one player and tries to kill them; and finally a play-by-email version which could prove interesting. It certainly seems that there is something here for everyone if you've the stomach for it, that is.

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