Genre: Action
Publisher: Value Soft
Developer: Delphieye, Inc.
Release Date: May 1, 2004

Buy 'NITRO FAMILY': PC

Umm... maybe the near future…

Many people got stressed and suffered from mental diseases and therefore came up with dramatic changes in social environments. For those people "Healthy Family", an addiction free and legal drug, became extremely popular and made “Golden Bell”, the producer of Healthy Family, the richest company in the world. But the drug started to cause serious damages to people after many years in the end.

People who suffered from side effects that nobody expected were hard to quit Healthy Family and they turned to be irrational and even brutal. People who did not use Healthy Family were called Soberers and they tried to separate the addicted from them furiously, which led to a world war after all.

After the meaningless war without any conclusion, Golden Bell and the addicted hid themselves in the shady underground but the CEO of Golden Bell, 'Louis' never gave up the intrigue to rule the world with his dream drug.

After Louis made every effort to develop a cure for the side effects which mysteriously needed babies to complete the research process, he finally reached to the last step of developing new perfect drug.

However Golden Bell dug its own grave after unknowingly kidnapped 'Red Chief Chopski', the son of superpower hunter couple 'Victor Chopski' and 'Maria'. Due to the Red Chief's tremendous energy and Chopski couple's outrageous chase, Golden Bell was ruined eventually and while nobody knows what was going on, the world was saved from the Golden Bell's intrigue. (Uh...the above was quoted from the manual, and I am not responsible for the lack or grammatical correctness) ?

Am I alone here, or does anyone else wonder what the hell happened to Duke Nukem? Time was you couldn’t turn on your PC without seeing that grimace behind the shades. Personally, I thought Bruce Willis would be a perfect choice for the film adaptation, but I digress.

"Nitro Family" is a non-serious hardcore first person shooter that mainly focuses on beautiful gore, sex and jokes for pure enjoyment of the game. By mixing those three different images, the game pursues to represent unusual but pleasant game atmosphere similar to B-movie style with never seen before original gameplays such as a dual-hand weapon system and midair combo counts.

If your style of shooter contains the words “stealth”, “tactical”, “hyperrealism”, or “torn from today’s headlines”, back up your browser right now, because “Nitro Family” is NOT for you. If, however, you fell in love with “Serious Sam” (all the while you were backpedaling), and long to hear cheesy, macho dialogue (like “Damn, those Alien bastards messed up my ride.”), you have to get your hands on a copy of “Nitro Family”.

There are so many corporate logos on the CD, that I have no idea who(m) to thank, but thank you all! This is the game that “twitch” players with a good sense of humor have been waiting for! What could be better than tooling around with massive weaponry, massive pecs, and an amazingly hot wife on your back who, on your command, will fly into the air dropping cluster-bomb destruction on your nemeses?

The second that Nitro Family fires up on your PC, you are shown a home movie setting your initial idyllic life. Then (as always happens to happy parents in video games) tragedy strikes! Your son is kidnapped! It is now up to you and the aforementioned hot wife to track down the abductors and bring them to justice. YOUR kind of justice. The kind of justice that is customarily followed by someone squeegee-ing the walls. The gore flows freely, and the enemies are weird, weirder, and weirdest.

Your weaponry is what you have come to expect from a sardonic shooter. Machine guns, Grenade Launchers, Shotguns, you name it. There are a few innovations, however. The ability to use a different weapon in each hand is a nice change of pace for me, especially when holding a close-range weapon (say a shotgun) in one hand, and a long-range weapon (say a rocket launcher) in the other hand. This makes the gameplay a little more seamless than in the pest when you would have to stop and change weapons as wave after wave of creepy-crawlies descend on your person with intent to do egregious bodily harm.

The neatest weapon addition is that hot, sexy wife I keep talking about. She rides your back on a saddle-like contraption, and if a hapless baddie gets too close, CRACK! Goes her whip and off go their heads. This totally rocks! If that weren’t enough, once you have collected some Fuel Canisters for her jetpack, she takes to the skies and rains down aerial carnage like nobody’s business! A few bosses are unbeatable with your conventional weapons, but when honey-pie gets into the act, they fall like I fell for this game!

And if that weren’t enough, someone has integrated a combo system into a FPS! If you blast a baddie into the ether, and then keep plugging it, you acquire combo points which build your characters to ridiculous levels! Now, how much would you pay? Don’t answer, because when you have dealt (or received) sufficient damage, you hallucinate your ass off in “ecstasy mode”, where everything takes on the hue of Timothy Leary’s CAT-Scan and everyone except you moves a lot slower, leaving cool vapor trails. Trippy, man…

Also included are three distinct mini-games, one on board a boat, playing tail gunner with a combination machine gun/grenade launcher, one aboard a helicopter, and one behind the controls of a truck. Maria (the aforementioned hottie wife) actually drives these vehicles, but it’s up to you to defend her and yourself.
The villains are mostly comical, but the sheer number of them puts a halt to thoughts of laughing at them. There are almost 70 different bad guys in “Nitro Family”.

The levels are very bright, making excellent use of the Serious Sam engine (around which this game is based), and while some of the levels are much larger than the massive levels in Serious Sam, they all should take about 30 minutes each to play through. Gamers should expect about 20-24 hours of game play in Single-Player mode to master each of the game’s 20 levels.

There is, at present, only a Cooperative Mode in multiplayer, but Delpheye promises an online addition to fully integrate Deathmatch play! I tried a number of times to get into a co-op game, but could never find anyone else on the servers. C’mon, people! This game is a hoot and three-quarters!

The music is top-notch as well, featuring a whole slew of songs I have never heard before, crossing genres and tones. But the problem is, they can get a little monotonous when you are kinda lost in a level and are backtracking to find what you missed.
Sound effects are what you’d expect, but if I were you, I’d tweak the bass settings on your speakers for a little ball-rumbling boom-boom.

In the final analysis, “Nitro Family” is cut from the mold of some of the most entertaining games out there. Namely the ones that don’t take themselves oh-so-seriously. Nothing against the Rainbow series, or the incredible Unreal Tournament 2004, but occasionally, you just want some good old-fashioned escapism. When the online elements finally fall into place, this rating will doubtless go up at least a full point. You do the math. It’s the most fun I’ve had without getting naked. I figured I’d leave you with that unpleasant visual.

Score : 9.0/10