Ye Olde Playing: Mortyr 2093 - 1944

[Tagaziel]

Recently, after reading an old preview of Mortyr: 2093 -1944 in Secret Service, an ancient and now defunct Polish games magazine, I decided to unearth this lil' game and play it, expecting a rough, unpolished horror that I'd have to suffer through.

The premise? Using a time machine, the Nazis have acquired a powerful artifact from the future and used it to lead a devastating Winter assault in late 1944, defeating the western Allies and the Soviet Union, estabilishing their control over the globe. Their success, however, has hastened the Armageddon - strange weather phenomena begun to manifest and in 2093, they have reached their apex. Obersturmbannfuhrer Jurgen Mortyr, a dissident Nazi official, has discovered that this is due to the aforementioned time travel - Project Chronos has disturbed the fragile time-space continuum and doomed the world. Jurgen sends his son, Sebastian Mortyr, into the past, to 1944, to destroy the time machine. Due to a miscalculation, he landed outside the castle he was meant to infiltrate and is forced to fight through waves of enemy soldiers to destroy the sinister device. Then, back in the future, he has to ensure that history is not altered and destroy the artifact used by the Nazis to conquer the world.

It isn't anything special by any means, but it gets the job done. Personally, I'm a hound for alternate history games and science fiction. But when it gets combined with NAZI super science? It's a must play for me (even if it's basically a copy/paste of Kronolog: The Nazi Paradox). The storyline is all but absent in the actual game (with the exception of the odd journal entry here and there), which detracts from the experience significantly. This is 1999, the year of Opposing Force, so a game with almost no storyline whatsoever feels really dated. Wolfenstein 3D dated...

Spoiler

As you can see above, the graphics are nothing special. Again, this is 1999 and we are looking at Quake 1 graphics when it comes to characters and weapons. Yes, they are charming in their comic book look, but when compared to the detailed grunts in OpFor or thugs in Kingpin, the game looks like a morgue on a bad day.

The environs you fight through save the game from being a total graphical failure. Cathedrals are appropriately intimidating and gloomy, castle interiors feel medieval and the future, well, looks futuristic. They feel good, but really, that's all you can say about them. Nothing in the game can hold a candle to the cliffs of Half-Life 1 or "Welcome To Black Mesa" from OpFor.

This opinion will change the moment you notice the nonsensical, gamey design of locations. An U-Boot dock several hundred meters underground with no underground river or caves for the submarines to access them? A rail station with rails ending in a brick wall? Machine park with no machines or exits to the surface? The game fails at creating convincing locales to fight in and no amount of graphical eye candy is going to distract the player long enough for him not to notice that fact.

Spoiler

The gameplay isn't much better than location design. Weapons are well designed, each has a purpose and is useful in a different situation, but that's nothing new after Doom. Enemies aren't brain dead and actually move around, take cover and behave in accordance with their weapons (riflemen keep their distance, machine gunners charge in, grenadiers try to take the high ground and support others), but they certainly can't hold a candle to HL1 Marines or OpFor Black Ops. The game's lack of an actual storyline cripples the player's motivation. The game simply doesn't provide enough incentive to play on. It has its moments and some combat arenas are genuinely fun to play, but it simply fails to provide a thoroughly engaging experience. I played the game out of curiosity, not because I was truly interested in it. That's a bad thing. Especially in 1999.

In the end, it's an entirely forgettable experience. It's fun for a while, especially if you're interested in bad Polish games, but not worth any price tag. It isn't as bad as foreign reviews might make you think, but it isn't good either. A shame. A Nazi-controlled future of 2093 sounded interesting.

 

[ríomhaire]

Fun fact: "Ye" is actually just the word "the".

 

[Barnz]

mortyr sucks.

I didn't know it was a polish game, maybe I should find my copy, and replay it.

 

[StarBob]

Time Travel stories are always dumb. People are always hindered by things that could easily be circumvented using time travel. Like in that Harry Potter book/movie where they had the time travel thing - they could have just used that perpetually throughout the story easily navigating through bad situations. Or in Terminator they could have just perpetually gone back in time and killed John Conner's great great grandparents in like the 1800s without any fear of someone being able to outrun the Terminator in a car or blow it apart with a grenade launcher.

However, Back to the Future is awesome. The End.

 

[stemot]

Mortyr and it's sequel are amongst the worst FPS games I have ever played, but the biggest question I need to ask is this: Why isn't it in the rate and discuss thread instead of having a new thread created for a review of a bad game?

 

[Bad^Hat]

I played the demo of this a bunch back when I played lots of demos because I couldn't afford actual games on a consistent basis. I remember enjoying it despite the graphics glitching out. No idea why.

 

[Sheepo]

Mortyr and it's sequel are amongst the worst FPS games I have ever played, but the biggest question I need to ask is this: Why isn't it in the rate and discuss thread instead of having a new thread created for a review of a bad game?

You could ask the same question about almost all threads in Games and Gaming.

 

[Tagaziel]

Fun fact: "Ye" is actually just the word "the".

The Old Gaming. What's so wrong about the name?

 

[Raziaar]

I like how people always entertain the premise that the German army if not stopped by the allies when they were would have been able to excise complete dominance over the world. As if the German military was able to stretch itself so far and still be able to be a formidable presence.

I mean shit, look at us in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most modern military in the world and we're stretched completely thin and going bankrupt on the amount of money and resources we're throwing at this. Granted, it's not the same type of warfare that Hitler would do, since he'd just kill everything that resists and move on, but still... you cannot maintain dominance over a region like that. You'd conquer everything perhaps, or a large chunk, but you'd never be able to hold any of it unless you actively took the conquered into the fold of your culture, much like the romans did. They absorbed cultures into their own and let their own culture be influenced by that which they conquered.

 

[stemot]

You could ask the same question about almost all threads in Games and Gaming.

Nah, most are announcements for new games and not reviews, this game I think was released in 1945.

 

[Bad^Hat]

Perhaps he wanted to spark a discussion? Kind of a big post to just shove in the reviews thread, anyway. I appreciated the nostalgia, whether the game was awful or not.

 

[Barnz]

After a hour search, I managed to find my copy!

 

[Gargantou]

I think the lesson from this is clear.

Poland should stay the **** away from FPSes and stick to making RPGs!

 

[Sheepo]

Nah, most are announcements for new games and not reviews, this game I think was released in 1945.

Which would fall under the category 'discuss'. If anything this is more worthy of our attention, because instead of it being about some detail, some announcement, some news about a game, it opens up a discussion about the whole game, rather than "This game wins award!", "This game is delayed!", and "The guy who made this game talks about this game!"

Perhaps he wanted to spark a discussion? Kind of a big post to just shove in the reviews thread, anyway. I appreciated the nostalgia, whether the game was awful or not.

And this.

 

[ríomhaire]

The Old Gaming. What's so wrong about the name?

Nothing, most people say "ye" when it should be pronounced "the" because "ye" is just an archaic spelling of "the".

 

[Krynn72]

Which would fall under the category 'discuss'.

Even ignoring the fact that the thread is called "rate AND discuss" and not "rate OR discuss" I think the intent of the thread couldn't be more clear in that it exists to enable you to express your thoughts on a game you just played. For it to encompass what you're suggesting it would is more than a little far-fetched.

 

[Sheepo]

Are you saying we should interpret it to mean that every post should have both rating and discussing? There is clearly quite a lot of both, often times without the other, despite that it is 'and' and not 'or'. That thread allows us to do whichever we want. And yes, that was a ridiculous proposal, but I was mostly saying it to make a point. The OP of this thread says more about a single game than is usually said in an entire page of 'Rate and Discuss', so even if the game is being rated and discussed, it's deserving of it's own topic, just as putting forth news about or media of a game with the intent to discuss it, while technically being an on topic thing to do in that thread, is clearly better off as its own thread.