Nitro Family

Nitro Family is a game created by the studios of ValuSoft and Delphieye(a company based in Korea). It was released on 1 May 2004. Nitro Family can be classified as a first person shooter, with some minor RPG elements. The game is built on the Serious Sam-engine.

You start the game with an intro cutscene, showing how a baby is taken away by a car. As a father you have to free your child from his abductors, but I wouldn't pay much attention to the storyline since the developers tried to tap in on the success of games like Postal 1/2 and Serious Sam. And those games don't really have a storyline and are pretty much based around absolute bullshit, same as Nitro Family. But at least the aforementioned games are fun, Nitro Family isn't.

The gameplay of this game is a simple shooter, you just kill the hordes of enemies thrown at you, which all have an AI dumber than the God Warrior. They pretty much run straight towards you, attacking you in the process even if they can't hit you, for example they'll shoot a wall between you and them. There are a few differences between a standard shooter and this game, one of them is that the game tracks the times you manage to keep an enemy floating in the air by continually shooting him/her. The game also has a highscore system which doesn't really have any purpose, since it's not like anyone cares enough about this game in order to write them down/compare them with friends. As you progress in this game, you'll amass money which you can use to upgrade your weapons, making this game even easier than it already is. In case I haven't made myself clear enough, the challenge in this game is pretty much non-existent. It's also possible for the player to collect enough cards in order to gain a "special" prize from a lady, but nobody cares enough or has the patience to ever get that far.

The levels in this game are unoriginal and boring, even though the game sometimes puts in a few platforming areas. You spend most of the time running through long grey corridors or in big open flat terrains, most of the time between huge walls or buildings. The game throws increasingly more enemies at you, but the game never gets challenging. The levels are empty for the most part, aside from the enemies and a couple of cars every once in a while, these cars can be destroyed for powerups, healthpacks(food) and armor. The enemies are ridiculous in this game, but not in a good way. Nitro Family is just filled with racially insensitive stereotypes, I wouldn't really care about it if they were funny, but they aren't. You have Mexican farmers throwing chickens at you, fat waitress looking girls shooting with rocketlaunchers at you, pigriders and so on.

The graphics are horrible and outdated. From the aforementioned levels and enemies to the animations everything looks bad, uninspired and pretty much slapped together in order to produce a cheap game. In a year where Halo 2, Unreal Tournament 2004, GTA: San Andreas, Half-Life 2 and WoW ruled the charts, you'd think that ValuSoft would've made sure that the game itself was somewhat decent in order to still get a piece of the cake.

Last and least, the sound and music, this is where the game reveals its true face, that of a cheap half-assed game. The game has one song and one song only, and it keeps on looping and looping, in the menu, in the game, pretty much everywhere. It's some rock song with dumb lyrics, some guy blaring out "Where did I go wrong?!?!?" and some muttering about how he is wondering about what watch he'll get and that it doesn't matter because he can't tell the time. You might be asking yourself, what's the relevance of this information? Well, you'll be hearing this song so many times that it'll damage your sanity. Besides the headache provoking song, the rest of the game is pretty standard.

My conclusion is that you shouldn't even think about buying this game, since it'll surely lead to a disappointment, after an hour you'll be so sick of this game that you'll throw it in the bin or your cabinet and never look back. There are way better titles out there that you could buy instead of this one, and I highly encourage you that you do. Nitro Family can best be described as an unoriginal lazy knock-off attempt at tapping into Serious Sam's popularity and success.