Malice
Xbox- Publisher: Mud Duck Productions
- Release Date: Jun 2, 2004
- Also On: PC, PlayStation 2
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- Critic score
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- By date
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Play MagazineA drop-dead gorgous game. If eye candy had calories, this game would make you fat...And then I beat it in four hours. Cue the crickets. [May 2004, p.44]
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Malice is, from top to bottom, about as standard and, unfortunately, boring a platformer as you can find. None of it is bad, but sadly, nothing about Malice is fun, interesting, exciting, new, or worth your thirty bucks.
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It's crippled by an over-reliance on the worst game design cliche ever invented: too much collecting. [Aug 2004, p.102]
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The story isn’t gripping at all which has been replaced with repetitiveness.
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It provides absolutely nothing that hasn't been seen and done countless times before and done better at that. Unless you're absolutely rapt with morbid curiosity about how Malice ultimately turned out, your time and money are definitely best spent elsewhere.
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Unfortunately, while brevity is the soul of wit, even at $29.99, it's hard to recommend a purchase of a game that can be beaten in a rental, and offers nothing beyond that in the way of replay value.
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The very basic gameplay is further dumbed-down by the imbecilic computer AI to make for a game that even novices can breeze through in one night (and we don’t mean a long one either).
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Electronic Gaming MonthlyThe gameplay is the equivalent of chewing a piece of gum all afternoon - inoffensive, but you just want to spit it out after a while. [Sept 2004, p.99]
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Malice is so generic and mediocre that its release only serves to spoil what little status it had as the punchline of a joke.
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TotalGames.netFirst off it's a 3D platformer but with less jumping about than you might be used to, which is actually a blessing because it is the worst double jump ever witnessed. It doesn't cover much distance or height and it's very, very slow. Pointless.
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Xbox Nation MagazineThe game suffers from a handful of setbacks, the least of which is its surprising brevity. [Aug 2004, p.82]
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No Doubt is MIA, the art is occasionally freakish and definitely not up to Xbox standards, and while "fun" is always a subjective call, the gameplay offers nothing new and contains a ton of repetition. Malice ends up being a small package that just doesn't offer enough.
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Malice has lost much of its gee-whiz sparkle. Now it’s an intentionally weird, unintentionally uninteresting platform adventure that might have been cool were it a launch title and the bar were still low. In 2004, it looks and feels more like a skippable relic.
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The visuals hold up fairly well, and the controls are solid, if simplistic. What's here is the underlying base of a game. They just forgot to include meaningful gameplay or a storyline.
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Official Xbox MagazineDeath would have been better than lifeless mess. [Aug 2004, p.80]
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Malice has some of the campiest voice work I have heard to date. It's not horrible by any means, but the dialog between the characters is pretty lame.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 2 out of 4
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Mixed: 1 out of 4
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Negative: 1 out of 4
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JohnT.Aug 20, 2004Oh dear Aaron, this is disappointing. Uninspired level design, and outdated gameplay. A shame.
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GamegrillerJul 29, 2004C'mon. This junk shoulda' been canned after all. Looks, plays, camera all are from 2001, at best....
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AaronJ.May 12, 2004