Project Remedium Review

Being a real doctor takes far too long anyway.

Project Remedium is a good idea at least. Looking at it I cannot help but fondly remember Osmosis Jones and that one weird spin-off TV series with him I adored as a kid. Mostly because of the game’s setting being inside of the human body and illness as the enemy. An FPS with a unique twist, something interesting in a world of Call of Duty clones.

But the idea has yet to pay off. Project Remidium takes steps in the correct direction but falls over its own feet before getting anywhere meaningful. A somewhat interesting story and characters fail to medicate the other illnesses of choppy visuals and gameplay with no real feedback. No medication will help with this, only time.

Time and patching.

You play as Nano +, a nanomachine robot sent into the body of a little girl who seems to be suffering from an illness which means she looks like she has a completely different illustration style from every other character, including her parents. After getting damaged for unknown reasons, you are repaired and sent off to save most of this girl from dying of various pathogens by finding other nanomachines and killing every virus in your way.

But strip away the rather good-looking visuals and what you end up with is a subpar FPS. It begins with the shooting. You have two guns to start with, neither of which consume ammunition until they are upgraded. The guns do not have any recoil, no noticeable bullet when fired and no hit feedback from the enemy. You’ll spend a lot of time wondering whether you have actually hit anything even though the enemies are not really bullet sponges at all. It makes the game boring quickly; games work on a simple action-reaction philosophy, hit a button and something happens, but with no feedback that formula is broken and it draws almost all the fun out of the game.

This makes it more a shame that the environment is so pretty and detailed and the gameplay does not compliment that. Organs are on full display, pulsating and working away and drawn into the action by degrading for every missed shot you take, which again would be easier to tell if you had actual bullets. Around these are structures set up by the other nanobots and their foreman, who manage the bulk of the storytelling in the game. They are charming enough, but it makes up for none of the other failures.

The more I played the more flaws and other niggles which should not be there became more apparent, trying to hide behind fast gameplay and pretty worlds. Biggest of these seems to be the horrendous optimisation of the game. Even though I dropped everything to low framerate was still choppy, never really managing more than around 40 after the first level. Bugs, clipping, they all appeared; areas were unpassable until the game was restarted and upon restart the game moved me closer to the objective. Any good will this game had disappeared after issues kept cropping up.

No doubt this game is a good idea. Hunting illnesses in a body definitely appeals, but all the execution does is ruin that idea, miss-stepping over basic FPS rules and laws and ending up with something that misses the mark entirely. You can push through the game but you will be dealing with boredom the entire way through. The game scrapes a 3 by being pretty and holding on to a good idea. Just don’t expect to enjoy this much.