Horror movies are notorious for having idiotic, yet maniacal killers and even more idiotic protagonists for them to slash at. Of course, there always has to be one person who ends up being less of an idiot or can just run faster than the rest. The same can pretty much be said for the survival horror genre, and the clueless kids from Escape from Bug Island have this dated stereotype in spades. To top it all, the game plays as if it has been sent from some maniacal madman from circa 1997 and looks just about as good to boot. For everything that Resident Evil 4 did to breathe new life into the genre, Escape from Bug Island most assuredly knocks the goddamn wind out of it.
First, let’s start with the game’s title. It’s got an exclamation point in it which, coupled with the bright green font and outlandish premise of the story, would lead you to believe you were in for a sort of fun jab at cheesy B-movie flicks, like Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! for example. Instead, you get a game that takes itself entirely too seriously while dealing with giant bugs, medical research, and even time travel. How could someone not even try to make this game funny or satirical with subject matter like that?
You may be asking yourself how one would end up on Bug Island. Ship wreck? Plane crash? Maybe some sort of wormhole conjured up by some guy with a brain for a head? Sometimes truth is definitely stranger than fiction. As the story goes, a girl named Michelle, with a mild interest in entomology, or the study of bugs, ventures to the island after reading a book entitled the Necro-Notes. I would imagine it’s kind of like when a kid wants to be Knight Rider when he grows up after watching a couple of episodes of the show. Anyways, Michelle drags a couple of mutual friends along for the camp out named Mike and Ray. Mike and Ray are an interesting couple to say the least. Having been friends since high school, Mike is your typical asshole while Ray puts up with him in a way that a woman sticks up for her drunken, abusive husband. Mike and Ray have no interest in bugs whatsoever and really have no relevance to being there with Michelle other than the fact that Ray is a total pushover who looks like he wandered a little too far from the Burning Man festival during a bad acid trip and somehow ended up on a boat with those two. The game attempts to make you think that Ray is completely p-whipped by Michelle while Mike only comes along to do two things: cock block Ray’s half-hearted advances on Michelle and draw his gun on Ray every thirty seconds in some sort of twisted fetish play. If you ask me, though…there’s more than just a little bit of sexual tension between Mike and Ray – and it has nothing to do with Michelle if you catch my drift. Seriously, nobody would want to around Mike for longer than a week unless he were the greatest pitcher/catcher in the league. Nevertheless, I digress.
More cockroaches than the Waffle House
As it turns out, Michelle runs off after Mike’s poon interception to which Mike follows to console her, leaving Ray all alone. Neck-deep in self-pity, Ray dozes off and awakens sometime later to see that Mike and Michelle haven’t come back. So he does what any stoned hippie would do, he grabs the nearest pointed stick and sets out into the wilderness with fog as thick as chocolate syrup – wait a minute – stoners and sweets…now it all seems to make sense in retrospect.
Once you get past the meticulous character development and back story, you finally get to take control of Ray and play the game. You’ll notice right away that Ray has all of the flexibility and finesse of Frankenstein in that he’s hard as hell to control, and can’t seem to do two things at once, like attack and move. Before you can fully realize what kind of trouble you’re in, you’ll happen upon a horde of centipedes that will immediately overwhelm you, despite being small enough just to smash with your hemp-sandaled foot. Instead, the game insists that you take them on by using the surprisingly deep combat system of standing in one spot and repeatedly swinging as the bugs circle you. At this point, you’ll realize that you’re in for the fight of your life as everything moves ten times faster than you while Ray lazily swings his stick and stands in one spot. By the time you can take aim with it and start swinging, the bug is already jumping on your back, which you’ll have to roll on the ground by shaking the nunchuck and attempt to take aim again. In the meantime, you’re giving yourself carpal tunnel by swinging the Wii remote wildly to try to hit one of them. Wash, rinse, repeat and add seven hours and you have Escape from Bug Island in a nutshell. You’ll eventually get better weapons than your default stick, such as machetes, bats, lances, and even a samurai sword. Each weapon does as much damage and is as useless as the last, though the samurai sword seems to have a little more stopping power, which means that you’ll be struggling to hit giant moths and lizard women three times instead of four. Sorry to burst your bubble, but the eternal struggle of Samurai sword vs. moth isn’t debunked here. You’ll also get your hands on a couple of guns, but they’re just as useless as anything else. Worse off, there’s no reload button, which means you have to enter the inventory screen anytime you want to reload your weapon.
King Kong makes a cameo.
But wait, there’s more! In addition to your melee weapons, you’ve also got ranged weapons, such as rocks, sandbags, and miscellaneous explosives that you’ll find scattered all over the island. The ranged weapons open up a whole new can of worms (horrible pun, sorry) that help to show you the brilliantly useless motion controls. Pressing the A button will bring you into a first-person view where you take aim using an onscreen cursor, and then while holding the B button; you flick the remote to throw. It’s not as simple as it sounds since merely pointing the remote at your screen will cause the cursor to start flinging itself back and forth. Once you gain control of your unruly aim, you’ll realize that your range of sight is totally limited which means you’ll have to move backwards and attempt to take aim again. It would be easy to forgive if ranged weapons weren’t as much of a condition of your survival. Unfortunately, that’s not the case if you want to do things like heal yourself as you’ll be flinging rocks at hanging fruit or worse, hanging nests that constantly spawn a group of flailing bugs in front of you. The same damage model applies for ranged weapons as the melee – six rocks will take down a bug nest just as fast as six grenades.
So we’ve already established the fact that this is Bug Island, which means that there are a bunch of mutant bugs like mantises, flies, moths, and giant rolling forms. Though the game’s namesake takes a backseat to other beasties with fewer legs like lizard women, pink dogs with human heads, carnivorous plants, giant gorillas, and bullfrogs. Hell, even the game’s boss battles don’t even involve insects, unless you count Beelzebub, but he’s more demon than fly. All you need are some indigenous tribes and you can easily get “Escape from Peter Jackson’s Copyright Infringement Lawsuit!” which I can guarantee will be a much more entertaining premise than this offers. At least it would be intentionally funny at that point.
Ray's a big hit at the freakshow.
After all of this, we haven’t even touched on the most ridiculous aspect of Escape from Bug Island. Yes, far worse than horrible controls, characters you don’t care about, lame weapons, and even lamer monsters. It’s even much worse than the lame boss battles against bosses that repeatedly unleash attacks with one hit kills. As you make your way through the game, you finally start to see your light at the end of the tunnel. You’ve managed to fight your way through nine chapters of hell to which you find out that Mike is deservedly dead, and that there are no survivors other than the fair Michelle whom you save from the fifth forced boss fight with a giant gorilla. Sure, you’re forced to escort a lumbering, stumbling, and overly annoying Michelle through groups of giant spiders, but at least you’re in the home stretch and the pain will soon be over – or so you think. All hell suddenly breaks loose and there stands Beelzebub in all of his glory – which you prepare for the final boss fight, only the cutscene doesn’t end. Ray gets knocked off of a cliff and in the ultimate slap in the face from Spike and Eidos to you, the player, the cardinal sin reveals itself. Ray awakens back at the campsite with Mike and Michelle where everything happens all over again – the cock block, the bugs, and even the same nine chapters. Sonofabich.
Sure, not everything is the same, some of the more pivotal cutscenes play out differently, but you’d have to ask yourself if it’s really worth it at this point. Your wrist is already aching and limp from swinging the remote repeatedly after all. Lucky for you, there are uncaring sadists like me who have played through this game twice to let you know that it’s not. Be forewarned, these are nine hours of your life you’ll never get back.
As mentioned previously, this game is damn ugly. Every character model lies somewhere between pornographic Bryce art and crayon drawings in terms of quality – making them just a step above anything I can draw myself. Character animation is stiff and severely limited as characters really do nothing more than stand around during cutscenes and stare blankly at you like a bunch of mannequins with the only exception being Mike who draws his gun randomly for no reason whatsoever.
The ugliness doesn't stop at the graphics.
The entire island, including caves and select cabins is immersed in the thickest fog this side of the PSOne. While you get a light at the beginning of the story, the game insists that you leave it off or else the bugs will attack even more aggressively. This leaves your Woodstock reject stumbling through the woods in the dark with nothing but a couple of trees, a giant cloud of fog, and looping ambient noise. It’s like a woman who wears too much makeup, it helps to cover the ugliness, but she still ends up looking like a clown in the process.
Having played through this game twice, I can honestly remember three musical tracks being played throughout the entire game, to which each one sounds like its being played by some unlicensed Resident Evil cover band. There’s a thirty-second piano loop that plays during cutscenes and in the inventory menu, there’s the game over music, and the music that plays during the final stretch to the lame final boss. The rest is the same ambient noise you’ll hear from the beginning of the game all the way to the end no matter what environment you’re in.
Simply put, there’s really nothing redeeming to Escape from Bug Island. It’s short, it’s bad, it’s easy (unless you count one or two really cheap enemies with one-hit kills), and it’s downright ugly. Even if you can look past these faults, you’re still left to deal with a horrible story and the blatant shortcuts the developers took. Playing the same levels over and over again is about as fun as it sounds. This game, much like the characters in it, deserves to be deserted.
Without further adieu, a day on Bug Island.
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Horror movies are notorious for having idiotic, yet maniacal killers and even more idiotic protagonists for them to slash at. Of course, there always has to be one person who ends up being less of an idiot or can just run faster than the rest. The same can pretty much be said for the survival horror genre, and the clueless kids from Escape from Bug Island have this dated stereotype in spades. To top it all, the game plays as if it has been sent from some maniacal madman from circa 1997 and looks just about as good to boot. For everything that Resident Evil 4 did to breathe new life into the genre, Escape from Bug Island most assuredly knocks the goddamn wind out of it.
