IN THEORY, Boiling Point could have been a very cool game. Taking a cue from games like Far Cry and the Grand Theft Auto series, it offers a sprawling game world and combines shooter and RPG elements. You can control an array of vehicles, blast bad guys with everything from a crossbow to an antiaircraft mini-gun, talk and trade with a slew of characters, learn skills, and more. On top of that, you get a colorful third-world setting to explore -- all 240 square miles of it. Exciting stuff ... in theory. Sadly, we found Boiling Point to be more of an unfinished beta than a real game, and at times, almost literally unplayable -- it's usually more frustration than fun.

With Friends Like These…

In addition to a general lack of polish, we encountered numerous bugs and glitches while playing Boiling Point: crashes, audio dropouts, your character getting stuck, others characters walking through walls, dead characters coming back to life, controls not working, and more. Just as bad, the game is horribly optimized, with stuttering dialogue and graphics and many pauses as the game loads its supposedly seamless world.

In an effort to make the game playable, we had to crank the graphics settings down so far that it looked like we were playing a shooter from 1998. Even then, Boiling Point still often played like a jittery slide show. Even the manual looks rushed, with credits bearing placeholders like "FILL IN NAME." (Note: There have been several patches released since the game's launch, which we'll address later in this review.)


Despite its severe problems, Boiling Point is intriguing for its unusual setting and the freedom it gives you. You play as Saul Myers, an ex-Legionnaire whose journalist daughter is kidnapped in a fictional Latin American nation. You head down there to get answers -- and then bust heads when you don't get the answers. As you follow leads about your daughter, you'll meet all kinds of shady characters and get tangled up with drug lords, guerilla fighters, state officials, bandits, and civilians who just want to make a quick peso.

Boiling Point tracks your relationship with each faction as you cultivate allies and make enemies, but this can feel arbitrary. We drove by a couple armed guards in town, and suddenly the game says that we're enemies of the guerilla faction. What happened? We later walked up to a drug dealer in a jungle camp and suddenly we were allied with the local mafia. We befriended a drug lord, then killed everyone in his villa, but he didn't notice the gunfire and explosions right outside his office and still acted like an old pal.

The different factions will offer missions to you, helping you gain clues to your daughter's whereabouts or just to earn some quick cash for new guns or a better car than the sad jalopy you start with. The neat thing is that the morality and consequences of these missions vary, letting you decide what kind of (anti)hero you want to be and how many people you're willing to cross. You can take a job from the local drug-running mafia, for example, but that will pit you against the country's heavily armed soldiers when you try to steal documents from a base or kill a colonel.

Boiling Point boasts a clean array of info tabs that let you easily choose which mission to pursue at the moment, track inventory items, heal yourself with syringes or food, and re-read dialogue. For each mission or target locale you select, your on-screen compass will point the way and the distance, though your map isn't very useful.