There is something instantly enthralling about the film Heavy Metal (1981) that completely sets it apart from many other genre films of its type. Sure, it has copious amounts of sex, drugs, violence, and rock ‘n roll, but so has every magazine from which it gets its name and inspiration. It’s not the move to full motion that was so exhilarating, but the amorality to this world. Nothing matters, there is no sense of right and wrong, and the concept of god can be disproved with nothing but a rusty axe.
Yes, Heavy Metal was a great existentialist work that wasn’t weighted down by angst and moodiness, but buoyed by huge lines of cocaine, naked chicks who totally wanted sex, and zombies. Lest we forget, the astronaut hero of the cool rotoscoped introduction gets killed off once his sequence is over.
This same dyspotic tone gets perfectly captured by The Divide: Enemies Within (1996) with an opening cutscene that lays out the terms perfectly well: you’re alone, totally alone in the universe. Your sole contact gets taken away, and its only after thawing from a deep freeze of interminable time that you finally get the chance to change your fate. But it’s a long, lonely road ahead of you, of dead ends and constant attacks by enemies that want to kill you. There’s no reason to keep trying, other than the other option is to just lie down and die.
By all rights, The Divide: Enemies Within isn’t as good as this premise provides. Basically it a game where you’re a broken down mech forced to wander the same mazes over and over again for the way out. And yet, games that are technologically limited take the initiative to set a specific tone in order to allow your imagination to take you the rest of the way.
We would be remiss in saying that there’s an extensive road left to take in The Divide: Enemies Within, and maybe after hours of repetitive gameplay, this inspriation can’t take us the rest of the way. And yet, for the dozens of uninspired Playstation games that aren’t any fun to play, this is a “feature” that they sorely lack.
For a film that doesn’t believe in anything, Heavy Metal does have an underlying message: in a world devoid of the arbitrary terms of good and evil, being strong isn’t enough to survive—only the badass will win.
But in a game as bleak as The Divide: Enemies Within, with its desolate environment devoid of compassion, your very existence is already a defiant thumb in the eye of a hostile world that would prefer badasses like you just fall down already.
How far I got in 20 minutes: After a long introduction that was able to convince me in five minutes what couldn’t be done in two hours of a completely white interior and copious amounts of smoking, I got somewhere. Honestly, in the end, it doesn’t matter.
The good: Can’t stress how much I enjoyed my upgrades when I got them. This game is more rewarding than putting points into an RPG skill tree.
The bad: Yup, it’s a lot of the same thing. But I guess the apocalypse is a bit on the repetitive side.
Will I play this game once this year is over: Yes, but only if the world still exists.
Days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 50
Play-a-Daystation 