In Disruptor, a 3D first person shooter like Doom you take the control
over a young soldier in the distant future. You have to succeed in 13
missions.  The more you prove worthy to your army by fulfilling your
mission targets the more sophisticated brain implants you receive that
give you amazing new powers to supplement your usual weaponry. So far
for the plot that btw is presented to you in the usual sophisticated
C-movie-style FMV sequences.  Disruptor's FMV has quite a bit of the
Warhawk look-and-feel (yes, nearly that bad).

Disruptor has "Doom" and "Alien Trilogy" written all over it in huge
letters. The 3D library is roughly the same as in Doom (ie. you can't
look up or down, dead monster sprites look the same from every
direction, the game features a (pretty close) fog/darkness horizon to
hide pop-up like in Alien Trilogy, the soundtrack sounds almost
exactly like the one of Alien Trilogy's later levels (esp. the ones
immediately before you meet the Alien Queens).  You may think now that
it's probably not worth getting and to some extent you're probably
right - Disruptor doesn't extend the "First Person Shooter" genre
anywhere (at least in the first five levels). However, it's
Disruptor's intelligent, inventively created monsters, the innovative
weaponry and the pretty and colorful textures that make the
difference.

Graphics: As I wrote above, Disruptor's graphics doesn't provide much
innovation from a technical point of view. You can't look up or down
as you want like in Quake or Tomb Raider, Monsters are sprites (which
automatically imposes a limit on their animation because of the little
memory of the PSX), when you approach a wall you see the pixels its
texture consists of. The biggest drawback (in fact, the only one
affecting enjoyment of the game) is the very close horizon in form of
distant fog or darkness. This problem can really get on your nerves in
big rooms. A big plus: Disruptor's framerate is very solid.

On the other side, the "artwork" team has done their job very well -
each level looks completely different, the texture maps look colorful
and full of interesting structures, the monsters are animated well
(for sprites).

Disruptor's sound is not outstanding but not bad either. The weapons
sound a bit weak (I really miss Doom's shotgun sound *sigh*), each
monster makes sounds when it gets active - vital clues for you.  The
background music is a bit monotonous but changes depending on the
amount of action going on - a really nice feature (similar to the way
it's done in Magic Carpet).

Playing Disruptor is quite a blast. Plenty of different monsters,
a solid difficulty level, 13 _very_ differently looking
levels are provided. Thus you always have enough action going on
and you always look forward to seeing the next beautifully rendered
level. And by adding special brain implant weaponry, especially a
"drain" option that essentially can act as a weapon and as a source
of ammunition for your brain implant weapons at the same time the
designer added a nice twist to the game and got rid of the always
annoying lack of ammunition in the hardest levels. Too bad that
interaction with the environment is restricted to the plain Doom
formula (shoot stuff, press switches, use elevators).

Conclusion: After only playing Disruptor for about five hours I can
recommend it to everyone who likes first person shooters. If you don't
have any game of this genre yet you'll be better of with Doom though -
it may look a bit worse and feature no intricate weaponry but it has
over 60 instead of Disruptor's 13 levels and is a much more scary
game. My (likely to change a bit as I play this game more) rating of
Disruptor: 8 out of 10 points.

A few details:
* Disruptor's memory card support is excellent (1 block/game, autosave
  feature)
* like Doom, Disruptor provides a "aiming aid" - you don't have to aim
  very precise (especially no vertical aiming is necessary at all).
* You can select one of for not very different controller settings,
  no arbitrarily controller setting is possible :(
* Sound and music volume can be adjusted independently
* Disruptor doesn't support any analog controllers


Karlheinz

-- 
      Karlheinz  Agsteiner         |  phone: *49/371 513 1667
 Institute  of Computer Systems    |  fax  : *49/371 513 1806
 Department of Computer Science    |  email: kag@informatik.tu-chemnitz.de
Technical University Of Chemnitz   |  http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~kag
My PSX pages start at: http://herkules.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/kag/psx