Graphics: The graphics for Insecticide are okay, but they are nothing you haven’t seen before. The action stages are a bit lackluster and mediocre, but I found the puzzle solving portions to be better rendered, perhaps because the characters in the puzzle portions are not cookie-cutter clones of one another like the villains you pursue. The movie portions are fairly well crafted.

Interface: Those who have read my other reviews will not be surprised by my low rating in this category. The key bindings for Insecticide cannot be remapped. You are stuck with the WASD configuration whether you like it or not, and believe me, I like it not. I haven’t used that set up since the 20th century, and there is no excuse for not allowing remapping, especially in a game where manual dexterity is critical to play. It was frustrating to die twenty or more times by failing a jump in the very first stage of the game because I had to relearn how to control character movement and jumping with these keys. If it weren’t for the fact that the puzzle solving portions of the game are easy to interact with, I might have flung my keyboard at the wall in frustration.

Gameplay This title should have been more fun to play. The combination of adrenaline pumping action with brain teasing puzzles should have been a good one; however, the action portions of the game seem like they received far less attention than the adventure parts. Even setting aside my distaste for the controls, gunfights with other insects seem to be little more than running, jumping, and shooting as targets pop up from behind cover like those cardboard ones from an arcade. The challenge of these stages rests chiefly on avoiding lethal falls and grabbing health boosts. Had the opponents been less numerous yet smarter and more willing to maneuver around the landscape on their own, the fights would have been more compelling.

Sound FX: Kudos to Crackpot Entertainment for putting some real effort into the voice acting and making the insect-industrial city sound like it really should. This works very well in the adventure parts of the game. Yet, in the action stages, Chrys’s quips get a little out of hand. While they are all entertaining, there are too few of them used far too often. The result of this is that by the end of an action stage, you are tired of hearing insect puns for the umpteenth time. Simply decreasing their usage by half would have gone a long way to making them more entertaining and less bothersome.

Music: The music is a pretty good imitation of saxophone-laden private eye melodies from who knows how many movies and TV shows. It doesn’t really get boring and never gets annoying, keeping the mood dramatic and still somewhat humorous as the elements of parody parade through the game.

Intelligence: Your enemies are not too bright, and in most cases tend to just duck and cover when they fight. In some places, they try to take the initiative and move around the area to get a better position from which to blast you, but by and large the difficulty of your enemies comes more from their sheer numbers than anything they actually do.

Difficulty: Aside from previously mentioned issues with the interface, the game isn’t too difficult or too easy. None of the puzzles have obscure solutions and your enemies, while a bit dim-witted, never bog down the action portion of the game with impossible to beat battles.

Overall: Priced at just under 15 dollars and offering about eight hours of gameplay, the first episode of Insecticide gives gamers a title that unsuccessfully fuses together action and puzzle solving, with the puzzles given more loving attention than the action. That’s a pity, because the characters, story, and setting all indicate a labor of love in recreating the various elements of detective stories.