Finally, a game that talks back when you insult it. Well, kind of. "LifeLine" is an action-adventure game, in the spirit of "Resident Evil" and "Silent Hill," whose primary means of control is the PlayStation 2's USB headset. Sure, it's a novel idea, but is it anything more than a cute gimmick? Stay tuned to "X-Play" tonight, and find out.
Satellite of hate
In the near future, mankind puts a five-star hotel... in space! A huge party celebrates this momentous event. Dozens of important people are invited for a Christmas Eve bash like no other. Something goes deathly wrong, of course. Out of nowhere, a bunch of flesh-hungry monsters invade the festivities and make ground beef of all the partygoers. You, from a remote operator's room, must guide a brave, beautiful member of the service staff. It's up to her -- and your voiced directions -- to save the day.
Talk dirty to me
Perhaps in response to the fantasies of billions of geeks, "LifeLine" puts a pretty blonde girl totally under your control. She won't take a step without consulting you beforehand. While she can get a bit mouthy sometimes, she'll always carry out your orders to the best of her abilities, that is, when she can understand what you're saying. See, the voice recognition in "LifeLine," while leagues ahead of anything previously seen, is still a little spotty. This poor implementation makes itself most painfully evident in combat, but we'll get to that later.
Basically, you have to issue voice commands to Rio -- the aforementioned pretty blonde -- in order for her to do anything. Since most of the game involves searching rooms for clues, you basically have to hold her hand to an intense degree. Simple things, like, "Walk to the table" and "Look under the sink" are easy enough for her to recognize. But once you get to the sites in question, things get a bit sticky.
Let's say there's a bunch of stuff scattered around a table. The coffee cup is easy enough to recognize, sure, but what about that box? Is it a cigar box? Or a jewelry box? Or a music box? If you say "box," chances are she'll respond with, "What?" If you say, "that brown thing there," she'll just cock her head. If you say, "Cigar box!" she might respond with something like, "The chair looks perfectly normal." At this point, you simply walk away and hope that the object in question isn't vital to your quest. I can't count the number of times we surrendered like that while playing through "LifeLine."
Killing them softly with your words
For some inexplicable reason, Rio has decided that she wants you to guide her through every encounter with the alien monsters that have invaded the space station. In practice, this means that you'll have to issue commands to her during combat. Stuff like "Shoot," "dodge left," or "low kick!"
Most enemies will have weak points that you can exploit, which are marked as different body parts that Rio can shoot at. The good thing is that you can string together several different commands into one voice string: "dodge left, head right, flee, recover."
The problem, though, is that Rio's comprehension of your commands is kind of sketchy in combat. I can't remember how often I gave a "dodge left" command, only to have Rio slide right into the monster's face. Luckily, the fights are never really that difficult, so even given these kinks, you can usually come out relatively scot-free. But voice-issued combat commands not only make no sense in the context of "LifeLine," but their implementation is off.
In the end, there was the word
"LifeLine" is close to being something truly revolutionary. Ultimately, though, it's got too many kinks to truly suggest what real voice recognition in games will be like. It's novel for sure, and most won't regret playing it at all. It's just that, when it gets frustrating, it gets incredibly frustrating. If you have a high tolerance for frustration, and want to check out something completely out of left field, give this one a rental. But don't count on this lifeline to combat your game-design-redundancy blues.
"LifeLine" (PS2)
