Shaggy's Weekly Review – Paradise Lost by GlobalVR

Just so everyone knows (in case they were wondering) I decided to give up on the Battle of the Week as interest for it waned but that’s OK, some ideas work others don’t. In the meantime, I need to get around to writing reviews again so here is Paradise Lost from GlobalVR, which I finally had a chance to play recently.

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Paradise Lost by GlobalVR and Signature Devices

Players: 1-2

Released: May 2006

Introduction

For years now gamers on the PC and consoles alike have enjoyed the Far Cry series, with it’s beautiful graphics combined with standard FPS gameplay. So what if Far Cry became an arcade game, specifically a light-gun game, how well would it translate to the coin-op scene? Read on.

Gameplay

Paradise Lost features light-gun action that is somewhat like a modification of BeachHead 2000 where the difference is that you move around from one turret to another and the screen doesn’t move with your turret. Enemies will come towards you in droves and you simply mow them down before they take your health down to 0. To help you clear out the crowds faster, you can use grenades, rockets or shoot barrels that explode to attack enemy weak points for massive damage. The game gives you credit for headshots which adds a little element of skill to the otherwise straightforward shooting and the competitive points system that is used in co-op play helps keep the game from being a total loss .

Continue reading for the rundown on the rest of this lost paradise.

The guns are mounted to the cabinet so you have the feeling of being behind a turret but where the screen doesn’t move around during a battle, it feels somewhat lacking in the type of action that will keep you coming back for more. There are no surprises, nothing that jumps out at you suddenly, nothing that really makes you wonder what might happen next, which is something that you need on a light-gun title.

Graphics

One nice thing about Paradise Lost is that the graphics are pretty good for an arcade title. It runs on PC hardware and apparently the engine was done by Signature Devices (modified by them) although certain objects in the environments seemed to be lacking the same level of detail you might have come to expect from the PC version . Still, the water and lighting effects look great as expected and the game does much look better than the Wii or original Xbox versions of Far Cry.  It does also use rag doll physics which on occasion makes for some entertaining shooting but it’s nothing that hasn’t been done before. One thing I do enjoy is the amount of color you get out of it, it’s always a nice change from all of the dreariness you see in many games these days.

Sound

Gets the job done but there is nothing special needed for this type of game and as it stands the sound/music is forgettable.

Cabinet

Paradise Lost is certainly more impressive in the deluxe version than with the standard cabinet(which uses the same cabinet as Aliens: Extermination) and while the game plays the same on both, I found that playing on the standard cabinet made me wish I was playing Aliens instead. Both cabinets look great with excellent artwork on the sides and for the marquee; the monitors are top notch with the deluxe featuring a 52″ LCD screen; the guns look different between the cabinets although they function in the same way with a trigger, grenade button and kill counter.

Overall

You kill guys, you kill bugs, you kill bosses but there is nothing there that makes the game stand out enough to become a classic. It can be fun with two players but as a 1 player title it needed some polishing to be more enthralling.

UPDATE: Here is a video I made of the game a while back, I forgot to add it to this post.