I'm Playing Everything From Idol FX (Part V): The Actual Worst Game Idol FX Made, FBI Hostage Rescue

Author's Note: If you missed the previous entries to this retrospective on developer Idol FX AB, you can catch them over here:

• Part I: Gast, An Admirable Start
• Part II: Nosferatu And Loophole,A Hugo Clone
• Part III: Grumpa and Imp
• Part IV: Drake of the 99 Dragons

Alex Navarro Lied To You.

It's time to finally end this wretched blog series.

I'm sorry to be the bearer of such "groundbreaking" news. Nonetheless, it is true. Alex's claim that Drake of the 99 Dragons is one of the worst games to grace the industry, let alone the worst game from developer Idol FX, is patently false. Capstoning the studio's admirable start and slide into tie-in shovelware, there lies a game that is indeed worse than Drake of the 99 Dragons, and it is the subject of this blog: FBI Hostage Rescue. Unlike Drake of the 99 Dragons, FBI Hostage Rescue is the worst type of bad game. If I were to tell you it's a foul tactical shooter with cookie-cutter level design, Z-tier graphics, and moronic AI, I think you can close your eyes and paint the broad brush strokes of what the game looks like and plays like. See, that's part of the "beauty" of something like Drake of the 99 Dragons. Nothing else plays like it, nor is there anything in all of gaming that does everything it tries to do and fails at all those endeavors the way it does; it's special. FBI Hostage Rescue isn't special. Worse, it is bad in a way I'm certain you have experienced before. Even if you haven't played this exact game, you've played something close enough to it that everything I'm about to say in my review practically applies to a different shovelware tactical shooter you've experienced.

Cool. A lockpicking minigame that simply is solved by holding a button, in a game with a timer. Very cool.

The "why" regarding this specific game's reason for being is reasonably easy to address. It's hard to imagine these days, but back in the 90s and early 2000s, the Tom Clancy IP was a titan in gaming circles, especially in the PC realm, boasting a multitude of games and sub-franchises that were among the best-selling PC and console games whenever they came out. At least on PC, there was a fairly in-depth and burgeoning community of PC gamers that only played tactical FPS games, and they had roleplay servers on GameSpy and their own set of agreed-upon vernacular or audio commands for you to use should you attempt to play any of these games online. The Tom Clancy series isn't what it once was. Still, in hindsight, it laid the groundwork for such monoliths in the industry like Battlefield, Call of Duty, Fortnite, and PUBG in that they required players to co-operate with one another and also follow a set of rules and guidelines while attempting to beat the team on the opposing side. They, and SWAT 3, spawned a rebirth of tactical and squad-based shooters on PC and even consoles, with many imitators taking the core concepts of Rainbow Six or Ghost Recon and running with them with less than half the budget of those games. In fact, for two to three years, Rainbow Six was one of the most heavily copied (i.e., plagiarized) FPS games in the gaming industry, not Halo, Doom, or Quake.

All of this is to say, FBI Hostage Rescue does not exist in a vacuum. There are other, sometimes equally bad, tactical or team-based shooters from this era. These games repeatedly graced Alex Navarro's classic GameSpot feature "Don't Play This Game." For those who enjoyed the gripping tactical missions of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, a game that prided itself in 1999 over the fact that bullets could kill you in a single hit, there were cheap knockoffs like Sniper: Path of Vengeance. Ghost Recon or Elite Forces fans could revel in the awful AI and visual diarrhea that was Navy SEALs: Weapons of Mass Destruction. And then there were the many, many, many Medal of Honor knockoffs that cropped up when everyone wouldn't stop talking about Band of Brothers at water coolers. On top of that, even the highly venerated developer Red Storm wasn't above belting out a game on the cheap, as they also put out The Sum of All Fears at the height of their popularity. The FPS genre was rife with shovelware that came out virtually every week, and that trend persisted well into the Wii, 360, and PS3 era.

An era of video game slop one can only dream of these days.

Upon booting the game up, I was reminded of another hallmark of a bygone era that may surprise some more "modern" video game enthusiasts. FBI Hostage Rescue is shovelware in the purist sense, yet Activision published it. Now, for those familiar with the old "Activision Value" label, which FBI Hostage Rescue operated under, that's not too much of a surprise. However, for everyone else, here's some gaming "lore." For much of its history, Activision operated as a point person or third-party liaison for budget games and their developers. Sure, most of the games published through Activision Value were contracted projects to represent IPs Activision thought had value, but not massive value to general audiences. For example, the longstanding Cabela game franchise started as an Activision Value property, and a handful of games used the History Channel name as well.

A version of Activision worth rooting for.

However, a few game projects from this program speak to Activision Value's pseudo-dojinsoft essence. If you paid them a deposit and passed a basic certification process, Activision, through its Value division, would press discs and print game boxes for you so long as you ordered a certain minimum number of copies. These games almost ALWAYS started at $19.99 upon release and were frequently found stocked in non-traditional brick and mortar stores like pharmacies, clothing stores, and supermarkets. If you remember seeing weirdly awful Wii or PS2 games constantly on sale in Kohl's or next to Walgreens' direct-to-DVD bin, here's how it worked. Activision Value would sell large batches of shovelware to stores that didn't usually sell games. It allowed stores that didn't know any better to stock their shelves with games they could constantly put in their Rewards Programs or trick grandmas into thinking they were buying their grandkids a fun gift while she was picking up her opium. Activision eventually discontinued this division as the cost of games jumped, but it was a weirdly profitable part of their portfolio for literal decades.

The Grand Finale: FBI Hostage Rescue (2004)

What Is It?

Notice how much of the screen the assault rifle takes up. It's a real distracting problem.

FBI Hostage Rescue is cut from the same tactical shooter cloth as Ghost Recon. Almost every mission involves you controlling a single member of an elite team of hostage rescuers from the FBI. Before starting a mission, you pick a loadout with the game offering hints on which weapons are best for the task, but it doesn't stop you from making sub-optimal choices either. There are assault rifles, silenced pistols, flash bangs, smoke grenades, and sniper rifles to mull over before starting a task. There are ten levels or missions in total, and each mission has a timer which, if you let expire, results in an instant "Game Over." The good news is that you gain time by completing parts of your mission objectives. Every mission involves an assortment of hostages that need to be located and then guided to a safe zone, and each time you do so, you regain time on your timer. You also gain time whenever you deal with enemies, but not at the cost of hostages. FBI Hostage Rescue is one of those games where if you allow even one hostage to die, you fail the mission, and the game also doesn't feature any checkpointing, which is a problem we'll get into in a little bit.

The first mission in FBI Hostage Rescue is both its "high point" and what perfectly encapsulates why the game is a complete failure. That first mission, which the GameSpot review points out is the only one they attempted, presents a scenario wherein three hostages are being held at gunpoint in a grocery store, and you must rescue them. However, there are three possible entryways to get into the grocery store. You can storm through the front entrance, use a window along one of the bathrooms, or climb to the top of the building and navigate the air ducts of the building's air conditioning system. Having variable start points sounds interesting on paper, but in the case of FBI Hostage Rescue, it's utterly artificial. Storming the front usually gets you blasted, and the time it takes to crawl through the air ducts results in a massive time deficit that is difficult to recover from. Using the bathroom entrance is the only "real" viable option; that artificiality is a recurring issue with the game's other mission scenarios as well. It might say there is more than one way to approach things, but there isn't.

These loadout options stay the same for the entire game. Completing missions doesn't unlock anything new or cool.

Likewise, this game has an odd amount of Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi DNA. Parts of FBI Hostage Rescue are procedurally generated, with some hostage placements oscillating between two to three options, and the same goes for the enemy placements as well. The companion system from Nosferatu is pasted into FBI Hostage Rescue, where you need to bark at AI companions to follow you as you lead them to safe zones. At launch, this system was so unresponsive that some missions were virtually impossible to complete because, for whatever reason, the AI resets its memory of your commands in two to three seconds. So, if you don't play the game with the fan-patch, you must hammer the "Follow Me" button every step you take. Trust me, while I did finish this game, I did so with the audio muted. Likewise, a significant narrative disconnect exists between how you play FBI Hostage Rescue and how it presents itself. Your character is a member of an elite team of FBI officers, yet every mission involves you controlling a recurring character. There's no squad tactics to mull over or additional party members to micromanage. Every mission involves superheroing your way through one Byzantine hostage situation after another as if you are Bruce Willis bursting through a maze of corridors in the Nakatomi Tower. That would be fine if this were an arcade shooter that didn't look like dog water. However, the game's missions try to railroad you through a series of tactical scenarios that beg you to consider things step-by-step. The game constantly contradicts itself on what it wants to be.

What's The Worst Jank?

Great, now I can play more of the game.

It's by far the game's AI. I've already mentioned how the game's hostage AI is rotten to its core, with non-responsive NPCs that make even the simplest jaunts towards a safe zone seemingly impossible journeys. What I haven't mentioned is the enemy AI being just as wretched. There are three enemy types in the whole game, and it seems like it's a fifty-fifty coin flip if they can immediately detect you the moment you turn a corner or are broken. And by broken, I mean you catch gun-toting terrorists, gang members, and cultists staring blankly into a wall or T-posing, and nothing seems to be able to break them from their trance. While Idol FX programmed variable spawn locations for their enemies, they didn't test to see if some spawn locations would break the scripting for their AI routines. Likewise, when the AI is functional, the game has some scenarios and situations where you cannot be successful. Sometimes enemies will be placed immediately next to hostages in closed or locked rooms and if you don't have flash bangs or smoke grenades, non-combat tools you can opt to forget to bring, opening the door results in them immediately killing the hostage and you failing the mission and needing to start from the very beginning. And as I mentioned earlier, the game's lack of checkpointing is a real bummer when encountering more involved missions. It is gut-wrenching when you get to the end of a mission that has taken you up to ten to fifteen minutes up to that point, only to fail it at the last moment.

No, the game really does look like this. There's nothing wrong with your screen.

The levels and environmental design aren't much better. The use of recycled assets is shameless, and there's no logic regarding how the missions have been ordered. After the first mission in the grocery store, the next mission involves you charging a charter bus that has tourists being held by an extremist group. While you can snipe the shooters in the bus, you can also do what I did: charge the bus and blast all hostile enemies inside in less than ten minutes. Some missions require ten to seventeen steps, and others have only one. There's another level where you explore a cultist complex, and the game warns you that some buildings have traps that explode if you walk over a wire. That device is a blob of pixels and is downright infuriating to notice, considering the level takes place at night, and the game's gamma is entirely out of whack. And during that mission, you can shoot propane tanks and make massive explosions, but the enemies inside buildings don't seem to mind and are unaware of your outside activities. They're frozen in place with a gun pointed at a hostage until you open the door to their room. You can physically outline the boundaries with every enemy with your eye, and it's the funniest part of the game.

Is It Bad?

Oh, yeah, this game is bad, and it's worse than Drake of the 99 Dragons on several fronts. Neither is considered a "looker," but at least Drake is going for a faux-comic book-like style, and sometimes its visuals work. FBI Hostage Rescue is a giant gaping void of art style. It's not simply creatively bankrupt; it is creatively in debt and lurching towards default. The few scenarios that the game presents are all microcosms that break and shatter in the same way, whereas Drake has something different up its sleeve whenever it throws bullshit at you. With FBI Hostage Rescue, you are simply butting up against the same moronic hostage AI along with missions that are either brick walls or cakewalks, with little rhyme or reason. Every building seems like it was auto-generated from Idol FX's box of pre-existing assets, and the audio design is the same poorly mixed ear blood-inducing torture from countless prior titles of theirs. Nothing in the game honestly works. When you try to approach missions in a step-by-step procedural format, like you would with the classic Ghost Recon games, the random placement of enemies and tasks ruins your ability to develop plans. On the other hand, every enemy is the same machine gun-toting doofus or expert eagle-eyed sniper, meaning you repeat the same winning strategies you used from the first three missions for the entire game. There's nothing to test out or experiment with; you usually can get away with running through levels with a spray-and-pray attitude and come out with a "Mission Complete" banner on your screen in minutes.

There's an overwhelming fog effect with any environment that takes place outside or in the day.

What truly hurts this game is that it doesn't represent anything interesting. You see, Drake of the 99 Dragons is interesting, you have to give the game and Idol FX that, even if you rightfully consider it a trash video game. There's no unbalanced bullet time, no awkward arm flailing, no janky wall climbing, no bullshit platforming sequences, nor are there any infuriating bosses in FBI Hostage Rescue. It's just you and your FBI agent avatar crawling through the same three to four corridor textures while the game loops through the same three musical tracks. None of the missions need to be played as they are presented to you, as the AI and level design are shoddily held together. The game doesn't work. It should come as no surprise that the quickest "speedrun" for the game comes to about eighty minutes. While there is some randomness to that, given how the game does have some part of it reliant on procedural generation, the patchwork is so visible, you can quickly surmise every trick it might have. Conversely, it is horribly unbalanced. In many cases, I would stealthily break down a door and then employ a smokescreen, only to find the room I broke into empty. That room didn't have anyone, but if I were to reload my save, it might have had someone during a second or third playthrough.

What Have We Learned About Idol FX?

Hopefully this series unlocked at least two or three of the ninety-nine dragons dwelling inside your soul.

Making video games is hard, and keeping your game studio afloat nowadays isn't a cakewalk. Honestly, as I have said in previous entries, it's downright shocking how long Idol FX kept chugging along while beating the same tune to its drum, especially when their drum was made of dogshit. Gast and Nosferatu are not "perfect," but they aren't the worst games I have ever played. Yet those two diamonds in the rough were only their first couple of titles and were followed by some of the worst slop I have ever played. Likewise, when you consider that Idol FX practically kept the same core team from their first commercial release up to their closure following the release of FBI Hostage Rescue, you have to wonder. What exactly kept this team together for so long, and how were they able to keep their smoke and mirror act up after the duds started to pile up? This studio made and then published Drake of the 99 Dragons and somehow found a way to get their abortive effort at creating a Ghost Recon clone published by Activision! In what universe or timeline is that even possible?!

There's no formula to follow or guidebook to adhere to that allows whatever you are working on in games, whether a massive AAA project or burgeoning indie darling, to find the audience it deserves, even if it isn't wretched or busted at launch. Idol FX is the fifty-seventh example of an all too familiar phenomenon in the video game industry. Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer. Someone at Idol FX, and maybe it was a group of employees instead of an individual, genuinely thought they were either turning the corner or were nearing a revelatory moment. How else can you explain their production cycle in which they plopped out two to three games yearly, with most harboring ideas and concepts not seen elsewhere? There was ambition with most of the games they made, for better or worse, and that's a rarity from slop factories these days, especially the ones flooding the Steam marketplace. There was something nostalgic about doing this blog series. Seeing a scrappy outfit from Sweden with zero budget trying to stake their claim in the industry, and it blowing up in their face. Shovelware just isn't the same anymore. You're never seeing bad games like these that aren't exploitative gacha games or contemptible works trying to funnel Web3 horseshit into your face.

With this series coming to a close, a return to form is in order on my part. After a glut of one-off features and odd experiments like this series, it seems time for me to put my old uniform on and get back to writing about Final Fantasy and adventure game puzzles. So, until next time, peace!