Cryostasis: The story of somebody somewhere fighting something for some reason.

Review time once again. On Today's Menu: Cryostasis. First response: Don't buy it for more than $5.

It's not that Cryostasis is bad, per se, it's just painfully mediocre every step of the way. The story revolves around how a nuclear icebreaker crashed and got stranded in the Arctic, and it's actually very interesting. What the story does not ever do, however, is make any attempt whatsoever at explaining why there are monsters everywhere. The combat is about 50/50 between shooting and melee. The melee game is a bold attempt to break free from the typical Half Life method of "hold attack until your enemy falls over," but I'd view it with more equanimity if this exact thing had not already been done better by Condemned, Chronicles of Riddick, Breakdown, Zeno Clash, and Mirror's Edge.

The melee game achieves that visceral feeling that it was going for, but at the cost of so much disorientation to the player. The camera stays with the main character's eyes, and he tends to swing his head around a lot while he fights. Sometimes this kind of disorientation is good, because it adds a level of realism; I liked the disorientation in Breakdown. Maybe I'm playing favorites (Breakdown is probably one of my top 5 of all time) but I just didn't get that authentic feeling here. I did get a certain feeling of nausea though, so that's something. The shooter aspect feels clunky and poorly implemented. The weapons are authentic and well-imaged, but after all that melee fighting, shooting seems oddly anticlimactic.

I suppose I should mention the big central mechanic of "Mental Echo." Your character has the ability to touch a dead person and go back in time to the moment they died, and control their actions to avoid the mistake that cost them their lives." Sometimes, this is as simply as "don't grab obviously electrified fire axe until you shut off the current, stupid," which makes me wonder if you're undoing some perfectly good evolution, but I have to admit that the mechanic actually works rather well, if you can ignore the massive amounts of resultant paradox. When you finish a Mental Echo section, the body will be gone and the character you saved will have changed something in the past, such as unlocking a door or repairing a machine, that will allow you to proceed. It's clever, but not enough to elevate this game out of "meh" territory. 2 Megafonzies. Go play Breakdown or Condemned.