December 8, 1999 Web posted at: 8:48 a.m. EST (1348 GMT) by Peter Olafson

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(IDG) -- One sings, the other doesn't.

While Abomination's tactical combat segments are well conceived and invigorating, the strategic element of this real-time suitor for the X-Com crown is disappointingly shallow.

Abomination puts you in charge of a pool of 16 troopers -- half of them genetically-engineered agents with unique gifts -- struggling to take back a plague-ravaged American city from a Lovecraftian cult. You'll send up to four at a time into multi-level isometric worlds on errands of rescue, retrieval, research, sabotage, ambush and pure destruction.

Survivors improve their skills -- four general and one specific to a character -- and the dead can be replaced by troops and cops found in the field. In-between, if you're meeting your objectives, you'll receive new weapons and tools and intelligence about your enemies and perform some basic asset and resource management.

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The mission portions of the game are the highlight. They have a persistent, grotesque style. Pulpy, tentacled growths are everywhere -- creepy enough that, while they're harmless, you'll want to shoot them just for the satisfaction of clearing them out -- and the progressively nastier creatures thrown up by The Brood will make you want to run the other way progressively faster. The view brings you just close enough to the action that, every time I saw one, I felt a shock.

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Moreover, it works. Nicely animated characters follow efficient paths through the carnage. You always know where each character's fire is directed by the dotted lines between shooter and target. Rotating pyramids highlight caches uncollected after searches so your team doesn't have to rummage repeatedly through garbage bins and mailboxes.

The mission maps are of manageable size, and if you do get disoriented, a colorful pop-up map is a key press away. An auto-equip option is included for the micro-management-challenged -- it occasionally auto-equips weapons for which ammo is unavailable -- and when you manually add a weapon to a character's inventory, the game automatically adds in the appropriate ammo.

And just when I started to tired of seeing the same buildings, the same bedraggled enemies, the same ropy, pulpy growths, Abomination took the first of what proved to be a series of interesting turns. I'm naturally suspicious of games that replace hands-on level design with randomizers -- no algorithm can compare to a designer with a vision -- but Abomination does it about as well as I've seen it done.

One hitch is the post-combat distribution of spoils. While you can read the health and ammo for each character at the top of the screen, you can't tell how much free inventory space each has without opening individual inventories -- and you can open only one at a time. Each consists of a small, scroll-able window that displays only 4.5 items and the current weapon, which means making sure the appropriate ammo goes to the agent with the appropriate weapon can take a while.

But that's really just an inconvenience. Where Abomination falls down is between missions. A game of this sort needs a place your agents can call home -- a stable center graphically consistent with the rest of the game world and offering distinctive tasks that provide a sense of process and flow.

But, like developer Hothouse Creations' earlier Gangsters, Abomination doesn't have a strong center. Home here is an interface that offers a sad paucity of between-mission activities. You don't direct or perform the research. (It's done automatically when you recover specific research-able stuff.)

Nor can you scout out the city for potential missions. While mission choices are offered, in one form or another, you're taking what's thrown at you. (You do have the ability to move supplies around, but this feels more like a simple administrative task.)

Fortunately, Abomination doesn't fall all that far or all that fast. The missions constitute the lion's share of the game, and they're genuinely fun. Next time, I just hope Hothouse includes more glue to hold them together.

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