In Crusading Footsteps

A Review of Total Mayhem

by Edmond Meinfelder

The year is 2156, in the wake of harsh corporate wars, mechanized battle units, called Bots, rebelled and enslaved humanity. On the planet Caetnor, the human High Command rallies against the Bots with the power of cybernetic soldiers, hoping to win freedom. Your 20 missions, should you choose to accept them, are to recover fail-safe keys allowing the High Command to shut down the Bots in starategic sectors on Caetnor.

After a briefing on the mission objectives, your squad teleports to the mission site. Following several quick exchanges of fire, a bit of searching, a little thought and a lot of destroyed Bots, you complete the mission goals and High Command teleports your squad to the base. At the base, players use the credits gained on the mission to upgrade armor, power sources and weaponry.

Total Mayhem daringly walks the trail blazed by Origin's Crusader. Using an isometric perspective (a la Zaxxon, Ultima 8, or Relentless), players navigate the world, shooting anything silly enough to move and a few stationary objects to boot. Along the way, players solve puzzles using keys, trap doors and hidden entrances to complete the objectives for each mission. As the game progresses, both the bad guys and the arsenal at your disposal grow in power. All the while, a funky techno beat drones in the background. In these respects, Total Mayhem and Crusader are identical.

The near-identical twins differ under scrutiny, however. Total Mayhem allows players to control up to six soldiers (cyborgs, to be precise); Crusader has only one. Total Mayhem also lacks the gratuitous graphic gore found in Crusader -- persons running about on fire screaming, welling blood under dead bodies, and so on -- because the opponents in Total Mayhem are robots. When a cyborg under your control dies, the soldier blows up in metal chunks. For those sensitive to blood, Total Mayhem offers relief from the usual gore.

Your cyborgs in Total Mayhem gain experience with each mission completed. Other than armor changing color, indicating a promotion, I noticed no benefits from experience. If promotions are to give visual cues, helping the player distinguish one character from another, assign a unique color to each cyborg. I usually had three colonels at any one time; all dressed in identical red.

Another difference from Crusader is Total Mayhem cyborgs can fight without player direction. Since players control up to six cyborgs, the clever folks at Cinematix reasoned controlling six cyborgs could be tedious, if not impossible. However, the game allows cyborgs to attack "at will" removing the tedium. Three attack modes exist. Defensive attack directs characters to attack weak opponents only, running away otherwise. Using normal attack, cyborgs attack enemies of equal strength or less only. Lastly, with berserk attack. selected group members shoot anything. Add in a player-control override, disabling all computer AI initiative, and the interface appears a winner. During the first mission, where only two cyborgs were available, I could not help but admire the clean interface.

The interface works well and game play is smooth. Crusader's actions, though more varied, are not intuitive. The mouse-based interface for Total Mayhem is intuitive. The mouse cursor changes shape when moved about the screen indicating: move to here, select this cyborg, shoot this enemy, climb these stairs and so on. Enacting any of these commands is just a mouse click away. New players can walk up to Total Mayhem and begin playing at once. Look Ma, no clumsy interface!

A few sizable programming warts leave unsightly blemishes on the otherwise clean interface. Though the interface works well with two cyborgs, problems occur, aggravated when more cyborgs join the fray. All cyborgs perform their own path-find to the cursor for the "move- here" command. The problem is, the Total Mayhem path-find algorithm, a typical bane for many games, makes mistakes. Your cyborgs stand in a small room, you command the team to go upstairs, but half the team goes outside, one cyborg enters the next room and only two soldiers find the stairwell. Sometimes, after directing the entire team to leave a room through a doorway, the squad members do their best Keystone Kop impression, rushing for the door simultaneously, bumping about repeatedly.

If Cinematix could not perfect the path-find, the game creators could have widened or removed the doors and stairs. Perhaps only the leader should path-finds to the target and the remainder of the group follows the leader. When separated from the leader for too long, the soldier is simply teleports to the team. Unrealistic? Yes (but teleporting lost members worked great in Interplay's Lord of the Rings). Removing frustration is more important than maintaining realism.

Another blemish is a common problem for 3d isometric games: The isometric perspective sometimes allows walls and ceilings to obstruct the player's view due to programming bugs. Mayhem offers a low-angle perspective; your view looks upon the game scene from a low angle. With a 90 degree angle, the view is straight overhead, but with a low angle, as in Total Mayhem, walls tower over game terrain, blocking much from sight. With the low angle and the bugs, expect to be in the dark a lot.

Toggling the selected cyborg often fixes obstruction problems, but when your team or enemies are behind a building or cliff, they are invisible. Arguably, walking about a turn or into a room having a Bot suddenly appear is exciting, but the sad truth is the Bot frequently does not appear. The view obstruction appears based on the selected cyborg, rather than what the group can see, making the auto-attack modes essential. If the currently selected cyborg is not first into the room, you hear a lot of fire and when you finally see the room, the battle is done. Worse, when the path-find algorithm works against you and half the team decides to walk around the building rather than into it, and the other half walks into a heavily defended room. I lost a few cyborgs this way.

A lot of problems come because Cinematix wanted the obscuring perfect. In many Ultimas and X-Com, obscuring only hides what is inside a building, until the player enters, when the building roof becomes invisible. Total Mayhem tries to show the player only what the selected cyborg can see at any point, hiding all else. A just cause, but the result is frequent cases where the game entirely obscured your soldiers from sight, leaving only the blue number above their head visible. Again, we have realism before fun.

A striking difference between Crusader and Total Mayhem is the story- telling effectiveness of each. In Crusader the story begins with the introductory movie. Three elite Silencers debate weather or not they should have let the civilians go and if they can go home -- suddenly, a hidden Mech opens fire killing two. The survivor, after destroying the Mech, is the player. The established plot is personal and understandable. In Total Mayhem, the plot is loosely established -- a movie with a brief summary of the background, having an impersonal narrator morosely describing events long past. The game manual's history section does little to remedy the pervasive feeling of plot detachment.

Crusader drips atmosphere -- the player feels the oppressive corporate government. The mood is in the dingy rooms, the remarks of the workers, the green bubbling slime, the propoganda posters and the computer terminals with quirky messages. Total Mayhem fails to deliver an enveloping fiction. The Bots walk across what might have been clean human research and military areas just two weeks ago rather than 116 years ago. Some movies, like Blade Runner, use lighting, sound and appearances to convey a mood. Total Mayhem conveys no sense of presence in a fantastic world.

Total Mayhem gets a gold star for being a Windows game. No muss. No fuss. Installation is easy and painless. Wisely, Cinematix took full advantage of the Windows winsock library, allowing both IPX and TCP/IP network play. Unwisely, Cinematix limits network play to either death matches or a capture the flag with 6 players. WHY? Having 6 human players all capable of finding their own way out the door would have solved one of the most daunting problems facing Total Mayhem, making the game brilliant. A sad lack of cooperative multi-player games exists currently. Total Mayhem would have trounced Crusader with cooperative missions. Still, Capture the Flag offers some interesting strategies and is enjoyable.

Total Mayhem comes packaged with 26 minutes of digital techno playable in your CD player. The music is good, but after the third time through, you ask myself, "Why am I shooting robots to dance music?" If you never heard great game music featured in Command & Conquer, A-10 II, Warcraft II, Mechwarrior II, Fantasy General and Crusader, you are in for a treat. However, the music feels out of place. I remember Dune II sporting a simple, eerie ambient synth sound contributing well to the mood. As Total Mayhem has no mood, dance music is as apt a choice as anything.

The game's art, though lacking mood, is beautiful. Sadly, the game art shines only in the zoomed-in mode. Zoomed-in, the graphics stun. Zoomed-out, the art looks so-so. Perhaps the game scales the art algorithmically for the zoomed-out mode, causing the "jagged look." True, the stunning graphics in the zoomed-in resolution give visual cues for secret buttons. However, simply moving the cursor over walls in either mode changes the cursor to the "use-this" icon, indicating something present. Battles require the zoomed-out screen, as the viewing area zoomed-in is too small. Since the game is battle-oriented, players spend most of the time in the zoomed-out mode. Having stunning art where players spend little time makes no sense.

Once in a while a new game arrives, challenging how we perceive and play games. Total Mayhem is not one of those games. After a truly great game arrives, new titles march onto the shelves imitating the great game. Some new titles innovate in their own right, endearing themselves to many, while the majority fade into obscurity as also-rans paling in the shadow of a great game. Total Mayhem fits the latter category. Short on story and mood while plagued with minor programming flaws exacerbated by game design, Cinematix takes a proven formula, adds some minor innovations and creates a game caught in a giant's shadow. Total Mayhem is a good game, definitely worth a look, but not the best in this revived genre.

486 DX2-66, 2x CD ROM, 10 megabytes of disk space,
Windows '95 or 3.1, Windows compatible soundcard,
keyboard and mouse

Overall Score:

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