Such ambition hasn’t been seen on the PC in God knows how long and Atari has landed itself an absolute classic here. A must-have - no questions asked. [July 2005, p.100]
There is no middle ground with Boiling Point: Road To Hell, you'll either look past it's flaws and love the expansive, open-ended adventure game beneath, or hate it because of its numerous technical faults, poor performance and general rushed feel.
Xenus is an exciting game. Xenus is a great soundtrack. Xenus is humor and lazy anarchy, where people live and are content with little, but at the same time do not lose their strength of spirit. Xenus is a good transfer of Latin America in a good light despite the problems of the cities from these games. There are 7 groups with which you need to coexist in order to complete the game in the least difficult way
Of course the game has bugs. but considering that the game is the first serious project of the Deep Shadows studio (we do not take Venom into account), the game turned out to be good. It's still nice to come in and admire the views and landscapes of this game. I've been doing this for almost 20 years now.
The basic storyline is good enough and the game does bring a few new aspects to the genre such as having to fill your car up with petrol. Unfortunately though this vision became lost during development and the game just feels unfinished.
Right now it is compelling, but riddled with so many problems that if you part ways with your cash for it, you're entering into a pact that will give you as much frustration as entertainment. [PC Zone]
The world is enormous and devoid of loading screens, allowing the player to uncover its large amount of content without interruption. But this impressive detail comes at a price. Boiling Point is crawling with glitches in both the graphics engine and the game mechanics, so going online for the latest patch is a necessity if you're up to the challenge of testing the game's depths.
Boiling Point: Road To Hell is bound to sit in the annals of poor gaming history, next to "Trespasser," "Daikatana," and other games that were hyped more than they were worked on, and left the gaming populace hungry for real sustenance.
It demolishes PC gaming’s dubious tradition of applauding technical ambition above all else with all the grace of a narcoleptic piling face first through a coffee table... A cold and flawed sandbox shooter, a rudimentary RPG and, for most, an almost unplayable experience. [July 2005, p.93]
In quite a few of my reviews covering beloved (by me, at least) yet shonky games – usually open-world RPGs from the mid 2000’s – Boiling Point often crops up, alongside Xenus 2: White Gold (an oddly-named sequel to Boiling Point: Road to Hell), Precursers, and Hard Truck Apocalypse (which has AMAZING music). The first two of which come from the same developer, Deep Shadows, a company that seem to have moved into hidden object and mobile titles, which is a shame, as they have real character and craft. If each game mentioned here had more time and money invested, they would be classics still talked of today.
The story of of Boiling Point: Road to Hell is that Saul Myers (portrayed in-game by Arnold Vosloo) is an ex-member of the Foreign legion who has been dropped in the fictional South American country of Realia to rescue a damsel in distress, however, this isn’t a straight ‘shoot everyone in your way, and get the girl’ effort (well, it can be, if you play that way!) but instead involves managing your reputation between the six available factions that run the country, as you build up your skill levels and equipment.
Realia is truly an open-world environment, and one of the main hallmarks of Deep Shadows games is that they enjoy plonking you down in their universe and just...well, leaving you to it. There’s a real joy in just making your way around, finding hidden caches and side missions, assisting the locals, whilst getting involved in skirmishes with drug lords, bandits and militia, as well as dealing with the uncaring wildlife. It feels like a FarCry game if it really didn’t give a **** what you got up to, and had no intention of bailing you out if you messed thing up too much.
As much as I personally adore Deep Shadows games, there’s a reason this doesn’t have a higher score, even at it’s incredibly fair price point, and that is tied to the very thing that gives them their personality – the bugs, quirks and foibles that result from overreaching, so it’s certainly a good idea to keep this in mind during your time with the game – and save relatively often.
Publisher Ziggurat get a long distance high five from me for their business model of polishing up earthy gems and giving them a new lease of life, as these artefacts really do deserve to be rediscovered and played by modern gamers, with Deep Shadows titles especially being perfect examples of games that have incredibly lofty ambitions and fall painstakingly short of realising them, all the while creating unique experiences in their wake – and at the current price of £8.50 on Steam, there’s no excuse why anyone with a passion for the history of open-world RPG/shooters shouldn’t dive in to the world of Saul Myers and get stuck into the South American stylings of Realia, what more do you want? It’s got Arnold Vosloo in it, for god’s sake!
Dafuq i just played!!!
- game is broken as hell
-stupid story about an **** looking fo his kidnapped daughter.
-stupid and repetitive characters
-game looks like it came out 2003 because the graphics is bad.
-voice actors **** BALLS!!!
the only good thing about this crap maybe the intro song.
While the game is not bad, it surely is one of the clumsiest I've ever attempted to play. It is Hell not because it depicts hell, but because it is hell to play it. Unless you are really patient, you'll get bored quite quickly going from A to B on-foot, because stealing some car is not as easy as GTA easy, and cars are rare anyways. This, and the fact that in the beginning you are really overpowered in terms of guns and weapons. The pistol is almost useless against enemies, and that's on easy mode. I kept shooting, and they just wouldn't die, but I died very quick when they used their assault weapons. Not exactly fair. Apart from combat and movement, the character interaction, skills and looting are badly implemented themselves, breaking a gameplay that's supposed to be fluid to work.
I would say that this is a game to install and play with a save downloaded on the internet, just to cruise around and avoid the unnecessary frustration of completing it yourself.
SummaryBoiling Point: Road to Hell combines intense armed combat with exploration and interaction with a vast and seamless open-ended gaming world. In Boiling Point: Road to Hell, gamers travel to the present day jungles of South America and battle competing factions in a brutal guerrilla war. Developer Deep Shadows' innovative game engine stre...