When I first popped "One" into my Playstation and started playing, I was
stunned.  I couldn't believe such gorgeous graphics were possible on my
humble PSX!  The explosions, textures, glow effects around the shots, the
modelling and animation of the main character -- it's all top-notch
mind-blowing stuff.  The sounds are equally impressive; from gut-rumbling
explosions to static-y radio chatter to the grunts and screams of your
victims, it's a seriously immersive experience. I wanted so desperately to
like this game.

For those who don't know -- One is based on a pseudo-3D engine like Crash
Bandicoot, in that everything is modelled in 3D and most of the time you
have some freedom to run around in a 3D space, but in general you're being
pushed along a fairly linear track, be it a hallway, ascending a vertical
shaft, or whatever.  Within this engine, it's a platform shooter, and I do
mean SHOOTER.  You run around with a gun strapped to your arm, blasting
holy hell out of everything that moves and leaping over bottomless pits
and between platforms in a Blade Runner-esque dark future world.  The more
stuff you shoot, the higher your "Rage" meter climbs, and the more
powerful you get, allowing you to shoot even more stuff...you get the
idea.  Sound fun?  It is, it really is.  But...

Then came the trouble in paradise.  I found myself dying, over and over
and over, not because the game was too challenging -- but because the
crazy camera angles made it almost impossible to execute an accurate jump.
This is the kind of frustration that makes gamers break controllers
against walls.  To compound the problem, every time you run out of lives,
you're sent all the way back to the beginning of the level -- and since
there are only five levels in the game, they're very, very long.  When you
lose your hard-earned progress (and in this game, it's VERY hard earned)
because you wasted your last life falling off the edge of a platform
because the jiggly camera prevented you from even seeing your character,
you'll feel the pain.

It's really not the control, as some reviews seem to imply; control is
spot-on responsive, and with the analog controller it's even better.  It
really IS the camera angles.  Sometimes the camera will zoom back so far
that your character looks like a fly crawling on a windowsill; sometimes
it will swing wildly around to a new angle while you're in the middle of
running somewhere, forcing you to suddenly adjust the direction you're
pushing the pad just to maintain a straight line.  In many situations this
can be fatal, sending you plummeting off a platform or into a bottomless
pit.  You don't feel what a good "hard" game makes you feel -- the urge of
"argh, I gotta practice this section more and I'll BEAT it".  You just
feel cheated.

I kept telling myself -- "Okay, it's frustrating, but this game is so
beautiful and so violent, it's worth it."  Well, after a while...it became
less and less worth it.  I started to realize that, after all, I've jumped
platforms and shot things oh-so-many times before.  Too many times to put
up with this kind of maddening frustration.  Why do game companies do
this?  Don't they have beta-testers?  It's obvious that an enormous amount
of craft was put into this game; it's too bad more of it didn't go into
the gameplay, which is, under all the icing, your usual "run from here to
here, jump over things, blast the bad guys" Contra sort of game.

So if you're thinking of picking up One, be ready for what you're getting
into.  If you can handle the frustration factor of playing the same small
segment over and over and over, hoping not to fall to your death when the
camera swings around for no obvious reason -- and if you're willing to put
up with it for the reward of what amounts to, in the end, some pretty
derivative gameplay -- One could be a game you'll love.  The sheer joy of
the graphics, animation, and sound, and the thrill of mindless blasting
violence, could make it worth your while.

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review submitted by Dan Burford
gilmore@netacc.net