Overkill

Year 1996, Sound Blaster was roaring, and I was sitting in front of the monitor trying whatever came to hand. Overkill from ID Interactive was one of those titles where you'd play it, understand everything it had to offer in fifteen minutes, and then put it aside next to your keyboard with a sense of mild disappointment.

It's a one-player fighting game set in a space, futuristic setting. The format is classic one-on-one fighting — a direct duel between two characters, a genre that was then dominated by heavyweights like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter. Overkill tried to jump on that train.

And that's where the problems start. The combat system is flat. Moves are limited, special attacks don't feel rewarding to master, and the overall depth of mechanics approaches that of a shallow pool. No clever combo architecture, no tactical development of fights that would compel you to come back and improve. It was playable, but it didn't hook you.

Where Overkill really scored was in graphics. And that's without irony. Characters are rendered from 3D models into 2D sprites in SVGA resolution, so compared to pixel-based competitors of the era, they look more volumetric and cleaner. The futuristic backgrounds have atmosphere, and even the opening menu with its spatially conceived logo gave the impression in 1996 that the company was really trying. Technically it was a nice result. Shame there was so little substance beneath that visual wrapper.

Today Overkill works as a document of its time — testimony to how many smaller developers in the mid-nineties bet on flashy presentation and hoped that gameplay depth wasn't what kept players engaged. Sometimes it worked, but not here. If you're interested in forgotten fighting games from the DOS era, or want to see what SVGA aesthetics looked like outside the big studios, feel free to fire up Overkill. Twenty minutes will be enough for you. And that's exactly how much the game allows.