Creature Lab Review

The best way to describe Creature Lab is to imagine if Umbrella Corp. was a one-man start-up. Developed and published by Image Power S.A., with publishing credits to HeartBeat Games, you play as a mad scientist hellbent on creating an army of mutated victims with the goal of taking over Day City, rescuing your beloved Clementine from the kidnappers, and sticking it to those who doubted you. Hidden away from society, the aim of the game is to curate the ultimate mutagen with the help of your grotesque creations (made by kidnapped subjects experimented on) to steal for you, terrorise the populace, and eventually take on the military. In practice, however, the gameplay is a slow burn of micromanaging, stats-comparing, and evaluating chemicals you collect in missions.

You start the campaign with quite an extensive tutorial filled with pop-up text and essential lore to the story. You first learn how to mix substances called Elixirs by pouring them into an Alembic to produce a mutagen. Once one is made, the components (identified by specific shapes and colours) that make it up can be placed into a ‘Mutagen Mixer’ for a faster — and more potent — result. With your mutagen in hand, you place an unconscious victim into a ‘Body Chamber’, pour it into a tank beside the chamber, hit the fill button, and voilà! A monster is born. After a few missions, you learn how to collect DNA from your creations, create new limbs with said genetic material, and upgrade your monsters with temporary enhancements and deadlier appendages.

When sending out your creatures to do your dirty work, they’ll eventually get spotted, opening up the battle view section. In combat, you and the opposing forces will fight in waves — with three in total per mission. Succeeding by getting your creations home safe depends on where you place your monsters and what type of opposition you’re fighting. At the beginning of the game, it won’t matter where or how well everyone fights, you’ll win every battle, but as you create more panic in the city, the waves will become tougher, which will make unprepared battles more challenging. As well as facing tougher enemies, the police will also investigate you — attempting to find where your lab is located — which increases in severity with each mission on a meter. Broken into five levels, the higher the investigation, the harder it is to complete your personal quest of urban conquest.

After each battle, you must ‘nourish’ the monsters back to health by pouring their specific mutagens into stasis chambers. If you use the wrong mixtures, your creation will die, which is why the Creatupedia and Mixopedia are your best friends. Both indexes are filled with everything you’ve unlocked and used throughout the campaign, from the types of monsters you have to the minute alteration between each mutagen. Each entry also gives the player the ability to write observational notes of specific characteristics indicated in the several chemical icons. For a game about making abominations against mankind, success is heavily dependent on labelling every discovery and creation properly so you can refer back to it in the later stages.

Each creature has its own aesthetic designated by the types of people you use, with my favourite design being the transformation of a Sikh person into a ghoul with its entrails hanging out but still wearing his turban. When I saw him for the first time, I imagined my character trying to explain to a jury that he might be guilty of performing acts against God, but ‘kesh’ is a sacred practice that you do not interfere with! Other than that, Creature Lab’s visuals are above average. Besides the familiar textures and obnoxious neon green used in every digital display, the liquids, when poured and moved around, have a bit of physics and (when mixed) swirl with psychedelic colours.

While playing, the music in the background of the lab reminded me so much of the Halloween mission in Bully. The best way to describe it is a clash of spooky and whimsy, with a heavy use of theremin. Unfortunately, it was the only sounds I thought — like the visuals — were above average, as effects like monsters growling and liquid poured into things were basically cookie-cutter.

Creature Lab does have a semblance of a story sprinkled in between missions and the hints that popped up during the tutorial, but it is easy to lose track of as you try to maintain your stock of chemicals and the welfare of the personal Munster family you have bobbing in stasis chambers. From what I gathered from playing (and might be wrong, so don’t take me too seriously), an award-winning doctor named Dr Gabe has won the Man of the Year award for his work in genealogy and stem-cell research, and your character hates him so much that he’s challenging him and the city itself to try and stop the monsters you create. The name “Clementine'' does come up every now and again, but I’m not sure if it’s a person, monster, or a red herring. Not that a lack of story dissuaded me from playing Creature Lab outside of reviewing it; however, it’s not exactly fun to play in general.

Don’t get me wrong: I was sold on the game the first time I heard about it. Now that I’ve played it, I see that there’s not much outside the rudimentary science and game progression. There’s a part in Creature Lab where you can take on requests from a message board for chemicals and body parts you can send off in return for fresh bodies and other substances, but it only replaced the workload from competing with Dr Gabe is clashing with the Chinese in the organ harvesting market.

Nevertheless, for a videogame about living out people’s mad scientist fantasies it works a treat. When it comes to keeping the player's attention and playability, however, it grows stale after a while. There’s only so many times you can spread panic in a city before it becomes the new normal.