People who haven't been forced to review a game before often have a romantic vision of how fun a reviewers job is. Sometimes I suspect that reviewing a game can trigger that amazing "I can't believe this is my job" kind of feeling, but I bet that for every one of those great moments comes its negative equivalent where the reviewer wonders which hand he should break in order to avoid playing a certain game any longer. Merchants of Brooklyn is the latter type.

I almost want to reserve my judgment of this game for a full review, but since I'm not sure I will be able to force myself to play this any longer, I feel I should at least warn our dear readers what MoB offers, at least for its first few levels.

Merchants of Brooklyn comes from Paleo Entertainment, making this their first stand-alone title (previously the group was known for a cro-magnon man themed Half-Life mod) and their second attempt to make a game about Neanderthals. In this sordid tale, humanity has failed to head the warnings of Al Gore and all but the highest points of New York City have been submerged in water. In response, members of the upper class do the only logical thing: They connect the upper levels of the city together with bridges and then breed a race of Neanderthals to use as a slave labor force. The slaves are also exploited by the Merchants of Brooklyn (MoB! Get it? HA!) and forced into blood sport in order to line the Merchant's greedy mob pockets. You play as a Neanderthal who was injected with the DNA of the lead scientist, and therefore become extremely intelligent and able to lead a revolution.

This sounded to me like a great premise, but that text you just read is better than the actual game. The in-game version of this prologue is a badly drawn and really badly voiced moving comic book. The bad voice acting extends to the rest of the game, where the only two voices you will initially hear are those of the scientist (who sounds like a 14 year old trying to sound like he's in an action movie) and the identical grunts of the legions of same-looking Neanderthal guards who serve as your starting enemies.

Gameplay is repetitive and all of your weapons feel almost completely powerless. Enemies are seemingly unaffected by everything but point-blank shots and your bullets appear to be only subtracting health from a variable instead of actually impacting your foes. Most fights take place in small areas where the player is forced to run around in circle avoiding enemies while occasionally talking pot-shots at them when get stuck on level geometry or forget where you are.

Its these kind of technical glitches that move this game from mildly annoying to nearly unplayable for me. The frame-rate, even on medium settings, seems to hover around 25 FPS in indoor areas and speeds up to about 30 once the player gets outside. MoB uses the CryEngine 2, and I can play Crysis at about a constant 40 FPS on high with anti-aliasing, making me think this problem is with the game and not my machine. Additionally, I experienced a re-occurring issue where when I turned my character to a certain angle, a large triangular section of my screen would turn completely white, making the game almost impossible to play when looking in that direction or even turning past that direction.

Once again, I back away from directly giving this game a score or even openly giving purchasing advice. This article only covers the first section of MoB, and maybe it changes into a completely different game (hopefully literally) in the later levels. However I feel I would be doing a disservice if I let our time constraints and lack of man power prevent me from saying something about Merchants. Rest assured, if there were any shades of gray, this would not have been written.