Hell Cab

The plot for Hell Cab could have come straight out of a Stephen King novel. You play the role of an unsuspecting tourist who jumps into a taxi in New York, only to discover that your host is no ordinary taxi driver. When he discovers you do not have enough money to pay your fare, he offers to make a deal with you. Giving it the old "Just sign here mate and you'll be alright", he hands you a contract which politely invites you to sign your soul over to the Devil in lieu of payment of your taxi fare. Being a tourist, you politely oblige and thus begins your nightmare taxi ride.

The taxi takes you on a journey through time, starting in New York and continuing on to ancient Rome, prehistoric times and even the trenches at Verdun, where you engage in hand-to-hand combat. Your first stop is the Empire State Building. Many of the hallways have curtains on the walls and when you open them (simply point and click) they show you a smart video clip. This is a neat little touch and is typical of the presentation of the game. All the graphic stills of the locations and digitised movie clips are highly impressive, but before you get excited, there is one tiny niggle I would like to point out. Yes, you guessed it, we're coming to the most important aspect of the game under consideration here: the gameplay.

Been there, seen it, done it

It's getting to the point where you could almost say you know exactly what to expect from an "interactive movie" masquerading as an adventure game on cd. We've had several of them already -Critical Path, The Journeyman Project, Spaceship Warlock etc. They all claim to offer the player a true cinematic experience on computer. To be fair, they're all visually impressive with excellent graphics and digitised movie clips, but, also, they all suffer from the same problem - limited gameplay. Hell Cab uses the same interface as the aforementioned games as well as the same playing style. What a surprise then that it has exactly the same problem. Rather than giving you challenging puzzles to solve, as is the case with most disk-based adventure games. Hell Cab sort of drags you along and points you in the direction of where you should be going and gives you spectacularly unsubtle hints as to what you should be doing.

I suppose in this sense it is a bit like a movie in as much as you don't have to think very hard to play it, you just trundle along and watch the video clips. There are a few combat sequences to divert you (you get to fight a gladiator in Rome and have a scrap in the trenches of Verdun), but they're badly implemented and pay no more than a passing nod to anything approaching decent arcade action. Hell Cab is nice to look at but if you shell out fifty quid for it, you'll be well pissed off with what you get.