Malice: Kat's Tale

Malice: Back from the dead?but barely alive.

When we last saw Malice, the spunky, red-haired heroine was lost in limbo?another ?Vapor Trail? game doomed never to see release (see ?Vapor Trails 3.0,? page 38, March). Thanks to a last-minute publishing deal, she has a second chance to make a banal impression.

Ironically, cheating death is part of the game?s plot as goddess-in-training Malice wanders around time and space, jumping between platforms and collecting translucent icons, whacking bad guys with weapons like the Clockwork Hammer and the Mace of Clubs. Repeatedly. Without much imagination. Double-jumps, magic floating jumps, overhand attack jumps?you?ll find all the uninspired genre hallmarks here. That classic battle of man vs. camera shows up, too.

For a girl who was supposed to be all about attitude, how come Malice doesn?t even have any personality? Really inexpressive voice-acting just makes you wonder what the game would have sounded like if No Doubt had delivered the voice-overs as planned. The rest of the soundtrack is full of forced orchestral whimsy.

Malice makes extensive use of bump-mapping and texture-layering, but the game world has moved on in the last few years, and Malice has lost much of its gee-whiz sparkle. Now it?s an intentionally weird, unintentionally uninteresting platform adventure that might have been cool were it a launch title and the bar were still low. In 2004, it looks and feels more like a skippable relic.

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