The graphics in Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. are uniformly bland. The textures are all grainy and dark, with a predominance of browns and grays. Along with this, the entranceways to doors are usually the same texture, as are the walls inside of the door, so you may find yourself passing up a necessary passageway several times because it looks identical to the rest of the wall, and then accidentally enter the room as you brush against the wall. Ugh. Combined with the graphical issues of the items and enemies, and the often-atrocious frame-rate, the graphics won’t knock you over. The design of the Armorines themselves is passable, if uninspired, looking basically like heavily armored humans. The bugs themselves look like... bugs. Spidery things, mostly. It’s hard to distinguish between quite a few of them. The sound effects are passable, with appropriate growls and shot sounds and explosions, and the voice acting is all right -- barely. Armorines truly gives a mediocre presentation.

Unfortunately, the gameplay sits squarely in the realm of mediocrity as well. You’re an Armorine, a vastly overpowered bad-ass that has to save the world from the invading aliens. Yeah, you’ve heard it before, and it’s not really spiced up throughout the game. Each mission is basically a fairly linear push-the-button, open-the-area, push-yet-another-button ordeal, with bugs popping out at random for you to blast.

Armorines has serious display issues that really make it difficult to play. Pick-ups on the ground disappear and reappear at will, it seems, depending on just how you squint when you’re looking at it. Enemies literally appear out of nowhere, popping into existence and charging at you. The game gives you four weapons per level -- three standard and one that is level-specific -- but I never once found myself using anything but the unlimited-ammo blaster. It kills just as effectively as everything else, but you never have to recharge it. It also auto-targets, which makes killing little scurrying things a whole lot easier.

The game seems to have strange bugs as well, and not of the crawly type. On multiple occasions, I saw enemies trying to attack through walls, parts of their appendages flailing through the concrete. Huh? I also found my gun tracking enemies through ceilings and floors that I couldn’t even get to yet. This is just plain silly. The enemies themselves are in a very mixed bag when it comes to A.I. Some of them get up close and kick the crap out of you as you try to get a bead on them, and others just quietly waddle up so you can shoot them. Of course, after playing for about five minutes, you’ll probably realize that your gun can shoot really far, even if you can’t auto-aim that far, and you’ll find yourself picking enemies off from halfway across a level.

The game also offers cooperative play, which is somewhat fun, and multiplayer, which is almost no fun. With the exception of co-op, it’s all been done better by Quake 2 -- a prettier, better-controlling, and more entertaining game.

Most of the enemies are trivial to pick off at distances. When the game forces you into vehicles, you may have trouble staying alive, especially when they spring up out of dark corridors and eat you alive. Use of the Dual Shock pad during these times is highly advisable. The game itself is difficult more because of its problems than any enemy.

The controls are pretty atrocious until you get used to them, and I found that using the digital pad instead of analog got me a lot more control over what I was trying to do. I experimented with the various control schemes that the game offers, and found that the default one seemed to work the best, despite its amazingly silly L1/R1 for moving forward and backward. That being neither here nor there, Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. is a purely mediocre entry into the FPS genre. The PSX can’t do FPSs that well in the first place, but Quake 2 showed how to do it well. Armorines, with its many graphical and A.I. issues, only shows how to do it passably. Unless you’re a rabid fan of the license, pick yourself up a better example of the genre.