Sewer Shark (Sega CD)

With the release of the Sega CD peripheral for the Genesis and Mega Drive came the bold promise of games built using live action footage, and there is a certain novelty to the idea you can interact with images of real people. Unfortunately, the Sega CD didn’t really have the technical chops required to display crisp video and developers were still figuring out how to even let the player interact with the full-motion video scenes in general. Sewer Shark, released fairly early on in the system’s life and even a launch title in the U.S., tried to take some shortcuts with its science fiction sewer setting, allowing them to make simpler sets and utilize computer generated images for the creatures you encounter. Unfortunately despite this, the hazy visuals end up severely hampering this simple shooter experience.

Sewer Shark takes place in a far future where life has moved underground. Strange mutated creatures like Ratigators and giant scorpions infest this subterranean world, so Sewer Jockeys are employed to wipe out as many of the monsters as they can all under the promise that if they do well enough they’ll have a chance to go to the supposed paradise up on the surface known as Solar City. Even when equipped with the incredibly durable Sewer Shark hover vehicles though, most jockeys end up meeting a quick end before they even get close to killing enough vermin to go above ground. Ghost, a co-pilot to many of the failures before you, gets assigned to back you up as your boss Stenchler sends you in on your first run with little hope you’ll be better than the rest. When it comes to live action footage, most of it is spent on Ghost and Stenchler with a few scenes checking in on your robot navigator Catfish and a fellow Sewer Jockey named Falco who is learning more about the sewer system you’re in. The acting is often wonderfully over the top, Stenchler a classic portrayal of a slovenly boss who delights in being cruel to his employees as his video calls often show him living it up in comfort while Ghost instead is played as more of a domineering military type who proclaims everything loudly and is quick to criticize, but he is at least on your side. Both of them will actually compliment you if you’re doing well at your work but are just as quick to snap at you for making a small mistake, but one nice thing about the story scenes is they help show you that you’re making actual progress since otherwise Sewer Shark is composed of plenty of flying through the same sewer pipes over and over again.

Technically this first person shooter wants you to think that you’re making progress into different parts of the sewer, but even when you enter the forbidden and dangerous Sector 19 it will be using the exact same layouts stitched together with only mild variation in how they’re presented. While shooting is the main form of interaction in Sewer Shark, the actual most important part of it is navigation, the customized Sewer Shark known as Hole Hawg you’re piloting actually flying forward completely on its own but its turning is necessary to survival. There are plenty of paths in the game that will lead to an instant immediate death if you take them and some go on for a fair bit before you realize you’ve doomed yourself with a wrong turn, and besides some button codes to continue from later parts of the journey, a death does require restarting the entire adventure so you really can’t afford to deviate from the expected path. Early on in the game, Catfish will call out three directions in military code every now and then, and when an eligible turn in the dingy grey pipe system pops up, you need to make sure you only take it if it is the right one in the sequence. A wrong turn isn’t always fatal but might as well be, especially since it will be quite a while before you’ll get new directions to get you back on path. One nice thing is that an indicator at the top of the screen will have arrows flash to indicate a possible turn is coming up, and you only need to hold B and that direction to take it. Since the video quality for the world you are flying through is rather poor these indicators mean you won’t miss the turns because you didn’t spot them, but the punishment for a single wrong turn is needlessly harsh most of the time and a later less clear means of determining your path forward can be a little rougher to follow.

The pipes you are flying through in Sewer Shark are long and dull and even early on there will be large segments that get repeated so it doesn’t hide it well. There is a tiny bit of value in this repetition, the enemies you’re meant to be shooting to earn points often appearing in the same exact spots of the pipes so once you realize you’re on a familiar route you can have your crosshairs where a creature is going to appear. Shooting isn’t particularly difficult since you just move your cursor around the screen freely but there is a major problem with clarity, especially since even as you fire upon a monster it won’t actually die until your ship is close enough for its death animation to play. When you’re blasting Ratigators early on this isn’t too much of a problem, but later scorpions pose a danger to your ship and not knowing if you handled them until the second before it matters impedes some of your effectiveness, especially when there are multiple targets. I can be hard to tell if a creature is in waiting if the tubes are windy enough for them to appear only briefly though and at other points the pixelated footage is so grainy that the only reason you can even tell a creature is ahead is because the game at least has the good sense to put a green box over monsters so you can tell where you target. You won’t always be able to tell if its an important target though, meaning you might be shooting at a harmless Ratigator and then find out that target your cursor couldn’t reach in time was a dangerous scorpion, but other times even when you shoot at something it won’t seem to die like the particularly large green scorpions.

While those scorpions technically don’t damage your ship, you do have a set amount of energy and things like taking damage will expend it. It will decrease naturally as you fly and firing your lasers will deplete it a touch faster, so things like the bats that fly into view are a waste to fire at since the game really does try to restrict your opportunities to regain energy. Even on the game’s recommended path, where you perfectly obey the commands given on where to go, recharge stations are fairly rare and you need to turn based on a small green and red light fixture that you can’t too clearly see until the time to make a turn is almost up. You must take the right path to get that energy refill and you probably won’t see another for a while, meaning a run in Sewer Shark can be doomed because you didn’t get directed to one in time. Turning to find one yourself will likely lead to an instant death as you reach a dead end and if you’re too stingy with your shots you’ll not make story progress while your energy naturally runs out, not to mention the risk of having energy depleted by other means. The game eventually introduces Moles, these being robots who fly towards you and will be an instant kill if you don’t shoot them enough in time. You can survive a fair deal of scorpion stings but then there is also a late game enemy who can rob you of power in huge chunks, Sewer Shark inventing many new ways to screw you over if you slack even a little on reactive play.

While there are those critical moments of blasting a Mole before it gets you, a lot more of Sewer Shark is just retreading parts of the tubes that the game doesn’t even try to dress up as some new part of the system. Another late game way Sewer Shark does try to kill you is with hydrogen levels. For much of the game there is a bar on your screen that serves little purpose until you get into later areas where it is now an indicator of the hydrogen level outside of the Hole Hawg. If it starts to get into the red you’re about to die, but if you press a button then a flare is fired and the hydrogen goes away for a while. There is no thought to this interaction really, you don’t need to watch the bar much because the only time you can fire the flare is after Ghost has said to look at your hydrogen levels and the game will prevent you from doing so until that moment. It’s just another way this video game tries to kill you and force you to repeat your boring flight through the sewers firing at monsters in the same spots as you keep flying through the same familiar pipe systems no matter where you are in the adventure.

THE VERDICT: The exaggerated performances during the video scenes in Sewer Shark can’t distract from its unappealing sewer setting and barebones shooting. Grainy footage impedes the shooting even with the green boxes to help you actually see what you’re aiming for, navigation is just a matter of taking simple directions, and yet you’ll be crossing the same sections of the sewer over and over again while nominally making progress. Far too many things are thrown in just to kill you quickly and force even more repetition into this threadbare experience, the energy system, hydrogen, and Moles all working together not make the experience better but just to ensure this game lasts longer than what it truly has to offer.

And so, I give Sewer Shark for Sega CD…

A TERRIBLE rating. If you follow Catfish’s directions and hit the recharge stations, Sewer Shark will for a while boil down to a fairly boring but simple affair of shooting Ratigators and waiting for some story scenes, but even when some true danger arrives in the form of Moles, it’s not quite enough to invigorate the experience. Too often are you watching the Hole Hawg cross the same stretches of sewer, the monsters you’re meant to be shooting sometimes spaced out quite a bit so there are periods you’re left with nothing to consider but the fact you’ve seen this exact sort of bend before or the part where your ship weaves between a few walls. While I’m harsh on the Moles as just being another weapon in this game’s arsenal to kill you and throw you back to the more lifeless parts of the experience, at least there is a bit of tension when they enter the picture as you need to be ready to shoot at a moment’s notice. The slow drain of energy on the other hand is just a nuisance and a cheap way to kick you back, the scorpions not extracting so much with their strikes that they feel like major threats but the recharge station spacing instead leading to periods where you’re just hoping you aren’t investing time easily shooting down monsters for it to amount to nothing because there wasn’t a station on the safe path. If more of the side paths weren’t designed to ram you into a wall for an instant kill there could be an interesting element in trying to find moments to explore and find a recharge station or maybe even a special enemy worth more to shoot, but instead you’ll need to stick to a single safe route that still rehashes huge stretches of sewer. It is at least a delight to have the hammy performances of Stenchler and Ghost pop up to mark that you did finally make some progress, a fact that would otherwise be indiscernible at parts since besides introducing a new enemy or two you won’t find much new in the sewer to show you’re progressing.

While the graininess of the footage definitely makes the incredibly bland sewer setting even worse as you can hardly tell what you’re shooting at until it’s up close and either attacking or dead, even a crisp Sewer Shark would still suffer under the weight of its ideas. Aiming is too basic and navigation is just a matter of following orders, but instant death is never too far away and being made to repeat all that shallow action makes even that grow more irritating than it should be. The live action scenes can at least be corny fun in isolation, but they can’t help Sewer Shark hide its failings and if anything they likely took up so much space on the disc that the game couldn’t include action with more depth or control. Being a pioneer trying to push games into a new domain can cause problems like this, so at least Sewer Shark takes the bullet of being bad so future games would have an understanding of how to tidy up their presentation and play so the live action footage improves and contributes to the experience rather than likely leading to major design issues.