Vigilante

It may be a little confusing, but Vigilante 2 will explain the story much better.
Again, it may seem pointless, but cut me some slack.
IT'S MY FIRST GAME!!!!!
Vigilante 2 will focus as little on the killing as I can make it, so sit tight.

(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)I'd snark, but I'm genuinely too dumbfounded to do anything of the sort.

I never thought I'd see a game worse than Cortes's(sic) Creed or Apollo 11, but here it is, in all its glory. Both of those games at least showed some strange kind of promise on the part of their authors, but this...it's like an eight-year-old with a taste for violent action movies got his hands on Inform 7, hit the ground running and didn't stop (or even bother to look where he was going) until he ran straight off a cliff.

Basically, the flow of the game is this: kill everything that's in the room with you, figure out which of the unmarked exits leads to the next room (optional: read the minimal room description which may, on rare occasions, actually tell you where to go next), rinse and repeat. That's all there is.

I say "everything" because the game makes no distinction between animate and inanimate objects. You can kill "Motorcycle" and "Glock" just as easily as you can "A Man Named Sniper" or any one of the various cops who, as the game informs you, are trying to kill you for no apparent reason (despite the game over message telling you you're supposed to be a "criminal mastermind"). You can even kill yourself and suffer no ill effects save for an error message. (Since you get ten points per kill, that makes killing yourself repeatedly a splendid way to rack up a high score. If such a thing matters to you.) The only way I've found that you can actually die is if you don't kill the officer waiting for you on your front lawn; he kills you if you try to go anywhere from "Street". Everywhere else, consequence-free murder and mayhem is the order of the day.

The game starts by prompting you to choose your gender. Naturally, selecting either "male" or "female" will prompt a confirmation followed by a parser error, and the game does not actually pause during this sequence: you can play through the entire game with the gender prompt displayed. This, though, isn't the first visible clue that this game is an utter and complete trainwreck: that would be the fact that the banner prints "Getting started is a room" immediately after the author's name.

It's more playable than either Hors Categorie or Dog Saves Baby, but that's really not saying anything at all. The game ends in a room marked "Cliffhanger" and the victory message promises a sequel; we can only hope that by Vigilante 2, the author has actually played some IF games to base his work on. Attack of the Robot Yeti Zombies or Gun Mute would be ideal.

Yes, this is the first work of a newbie, and it shows. It's extremely rough around the edges and really could use a lot more detail and backstory. Then again, Vigilante doesn't aspire to be anything of import. If you're expecting Photopia or The Moonlit Tower, here, well, why would you?

The game is complete and winnable, which beats all the IntroComp games and nearly all SpeedIF games; so when you look at it from that perspective, you can at least enjoy it. Playing time is less than two minutes, and the plot consists of simply shooting everyone who stands in your way. Seen from the perspective of the "world is against me" typical to vigilante movies, there's some catharsis in wiping out your foes.

Anyhow, I can't really say that this game deserves more than one star, but I would like to encourage the author to give it another shot (pun intended).