Review #590: RLH: Run Like Hell

 The Thing meets Alien.

 I bet you've never heard of this game. I found it by chance too, searching for a canceled N64 game I remembered reading about when I was younger(Turned out to be a "Survivor Day One", by Konami) and somehow I ended up learning about Run Like Hell. There's not much survival in this Survival Horror game(Infinite ammo, I finished the game with nearly 200 healing items to spare) but it's worth a look if you're into horror flicks.

 You play as Nicholas, a human aboard a Space Station housing a few different species. After returning from an expedition he comes to find the whole station overrun by weird, fleshy aliens that have murdered everyone, including, maybe, his fiancee. The story throws every action/horror movie trope out there, everything you think will happen WILL happen and, even so, I found myself endeared with the cast of characters, even though I knew which ones would die I couldn't help but feel sad they bit the bullet. Word of the wise: Before starting the game you can skip the Tutorial section. Don't. It lasts 30 minutes, provides context and background to the setting and characters as well as having a few supplies and weapon enhancers spread throughout. The tutorial makes the whole of the game much better by fleshing out the story, one of the main focuses of the game. Seriously, there're a lot of cutscenes here!

 Your mileage may vary on this, but one of the game's strength lies on it's cheese. The dialogue is as cheesy as you'd expect out of a popcorn horror/action movie, and you can add to it its weird Computer-game like humor: Beverages called 'B.A.W.L.S.', female character models with ridiculously large breasts, etc. And you can add to this how bad and stilted character animations are. It's certainly around its edges, but dammit, it's bad in all the right ways.

 The brunt of the game has you exploring various areas of the infested ship, searching for key items or door-passwords in order to progress. In a hilarious turn of events, the game's best weapons are also the ones with infinite ammo: The Rifle, the Pulse Rifle and the Automatic Rifle. All the other weapons use ammo, like the shotgun, and they suck! Stick to your rifles and you'll be fine. Combat is a fairly simple affair: Hold R1 to aim at an enemy, and strafe around it while shooting at it. Occasionally you might need to sidestep around in order to avoid attacks.

 The game lasts about 8 hours, which is fine, although it would've been nice to be able to skip more cutscenes. The game is filled with them, it tried to be as cinematic as it could during the PS2 era, but not all of them can be skipped, and having to endure a long one before retrying a boss... is no fun. Although, to be fair, bosses only killed me because I was being stingy,  I did have a surplus of nearly 200 medkits after all! It's a simple, easy game that I think succeeds in doing what it wanted: Being a very cinematic, cheesy playable action/horror flick. Heck, the game throws all pretenses away when the action gets going, changing the music into a hard-rock tune with vocals.

 I'm gonna go the distance and call this one an obscure gem. It's not a great game, at least not in a traditional way, but I found it very, very entertaining. As sloppy as it can be, everything works well enough to compliment how campy the whole thing is, making the game something that's more than the sum of its parts.
 7.0 out of 10