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The levels are brimming with atmosphere and twist your mind into new shapes of unreality with infinite ease.

Variety is the spice of life, so they say. Never is this truer than when playing videogames. I don’t want to trudge round identikit levels for hours on end, I want unexpected things to happen, different things to do, several vehicles to use, and a healthy assortment of baddies. Psychotoxic understands such gaming needs, and attempts to address them.



You are Angie Prophet, a lass with several unique abilities, who is tasked with saving mankind from an impending Nuclear Armageddon in the year 2022. Her special abilities include regeneration, invisibility, time-control and a rather handy talent of being able to infiltrate the dreams of anyone she chooses. These endowments must aid her on her quests.



Variety comes in the form of 19 different weapon types, 90 unique baddies to face, 29 separate levels, the aforementioned special powers as well as others, and a pervading hint of non-linearity. As you may have guessed, Psychotoxic is a FPS, and a rather enigmatic one at that. Bear with me.



The core gameplay values are little different from any other shooter. You wander round the levels, shoot the baddies, open locked doors, and pick up medkits to bolster your lead-addled health. Graphics are pretty decent, everything has ragdoll physics, and some of the scenery is destructible, blah blah, etc.



What I really want to talk about are the 8 special levels called the ‘dream stages’. These occur when Angie uses her telepathic power to infiltrate a person’s dream, attempting to retrieve some vital piece of information from their memory. This is where the game joyously hurls off its shackles of realism and lets you loose into a series of alternate worlds that delve into realms of pure abstraction.



Freed from the constraints of an earth setting, you now get a demonstration of the true creative talent behind Psychotoxic. These levels are frankly works of genius; exquisitely formed works of art painted by the finest digital brushes around. The scenarios are as mad and wild as anything you could ever dream, yet so highly detailed and atmospheric that you are transported effortlessly into a whole new dimension.



Try this one on for size. You find yourself in the reception of a beautifully dilapidated old hotel. To add a surreal tinge to the level, all your movements are at half speed, and there is a sluggish motion blur on every movement you make. As your torpid gaze takes in these surroundings, you notice something else. There is a psychotic masked murderer heading straight for you, wielding a giant meat cleaver.



Your task is to find some office or other in the hotel, and retrieve the exit key. The problems? You have no idea where the room is or how to find it, you are armed only with an ancient pistol that has an interminable reload time, and of course there’s the small matter of that dangerous psycho intent on a mincemeat supper.



OK, first things first. Run! Heading through various rooms brings you to the hotel kitchen. Horrors! It is a sickening sight to make your stomach churn. The only fodder being prepared in this kitchen are human heads. Grilled head, boiled head, chopped head, or head flambé. The adjoining dining room is a macabre repeat of this head-fest, with ghoulish platters adorning the table.



Now you stumble onto a maze of corridors and hallways, wooden planking everywhere. To go down a particular corridor you have to blast through the planking with your pistol. Fail to take out enough planks to squeeze through by the time your gun chamber is empty, and your cleaver chum will have supper after all.



So speeding down a corridor with him hot on your tail, Angie still moving at half speed, loads more planks ahead, and then suddenly a situation that couldn’t get much worse….gets worse. A venomous giant spider scuttles ominously into view ahead. Your pistol is still reloading. The time for blind panic and underwear soiling is now!



All the dream stages combine a moody atmosphere with disturbingly surreal effects, chilling enemies, astounding graphical level characterisation, pleasantly bizarre mission objectives and some of the most abstract level design I have ever seen. The whole game is worth playing through for these sublime levels alone.



Things aren’t totally finished yet of course, there are plenty of graphical inconsistencies, people walking and shooting through walls, frequent abnormal physics behaviours, and some plumb stupid AI that bears very little illusion of being human. Hopefully, the months up until the release date will be used wisely to iron out these foibles.



Psychotoxic is looking very promising indeed. If it can improve upon its early promise, we could be looking at a true classic. We’ll give you the final verdict when the game is released in March. Until then we can just dream about giant spiders and cleaver-brandishing psychopaths…


Preview by Adam Shirley.