Bytten

Many of us will be familiar with multiplayer first person shooters, games like Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournement that pit many players against each other in a death match of skill. Multi Mayhem is a third person stomper from South Africa. Your task is to jump and jet boot around a 2D yet polygonal world and stamp on bots or other online players.

The colours are all very bright and childlike in this game and the levels themselves are 3D, despite the action taking place in a single plane in the cuboid universe. You have a choice of three major characters to pick from, a basic girl, basic boy and bog standard carrot nose. Each comes in a variety of outfits and you also get a choice of jet boots, which allow your character to fly as well as stomp. Jet boots are your only weapon here.

The 3D graphics in the game are all well done. Of the five or so arenas on offer, the fish tank has huge fish swimming around and some nice ornaments as well as bubble effects. The main characters are very stylish and have as much animation as any full price title. All of the in game screen is fully 3D and the game has a bright and fresh style, like the bare bones of a modern console game.

The sound is above average too. You get some ambient noise, and the music rolls a tsunami of bass out of the speakers!

Multi Mayhem is strange to play. While on the ground your character can run, and jump by tapping the space bar. There are trampets and mirrors to bounce you around, and other boxes and level specific obstacles. In many ways the origins of the game seem closer to an N.E.S. platform game than Quake.

A stab of the up arrow causes the player to fly, and while in the air left/right movement only works while moving up or down at the same time. In other words you cannot simply move sideways, and this is the only factor that stops players chasing each other around like flies. Scoring is a matter of 'flying' over an opponent and moving rapidly down to squash them.

Any competitive multiplayer game tends to be fun. It's a pity there is no support for multiple joysticks to permit hot-seat play because USB ports allow almost anyone to plug in more than one game controller nowadays.

Multi Mayhem has a raw edge that makes the game almost seem incomplete but I sensed a lot of potential here. What is there now is an interesting and stimulating experience but I feel that some work needs to be done on the game play to make it as exciting as a multiplayer first person shooter game. It would be nice to see if this title is updated and experimented with because Multi Mayhem is not quite like any other game I've come across.

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