The best thing Psycho Circus has going for it are the villains. Oddly mutated circus freaks with violent dispositions, these bosses and sub-bosses are nearly worth the price of admission. The Arachniclown (half-clown and half-spider) paces back and forth nervously in a tower, waiting for players to make it past his minions so he can destroy them. The Fat Lady is a grotesque, decaying corpse with a serious case of water retention. Seeing these villains lurking about in cutscenes before actually reaching them heightens the suspense and adds a little to the eerie overtones of the game. But once they are engaged, the bad guys prove to be little more than prettily painted blobs, moving back and forth to avoid your attacks halfheartedly, and not really posing much of a threat to anyone. And their minions, the hordes of little crawly things with a tendency to spawn at the most inopportune times, well, they aren't very tough either. Unless pointing and shooting is something you have deep-seated problems with, you should be able to paint the floor with headless-spider guts and flame-throwing dog-demons with the greatest of ease.

Another good feature of the game is its arsenal. A small assortment of cool guns and melee weapons grace The Nightmare Child, with names like the Punisher, the Windblade and the Galaxion. Weapons are divided into three categories: melee, common and ultimate. Each of the four characters that players must control to beat the game start with their own melee weapon, and find one other weapon that is specialized to that character. The ultimate weapon is found somewhere near the end of the character's part of the quest, and will actually delete their energy when used too much. While we liked the design and effect of most of weapons, they surely aren't enough to carry the game.

So why the bad opening to the review? The gameplay. While the twitch-reaction style of shooter can be fun in some cases, the same qualities that make it fun can also become laughable when the developer decides to throw some half-baked story and redundant puzzles into the game. If shooting is going to be the one and only important factor in a game -- fine, give us lots of shooting, but don't have us wandering around for hours on end trying to find some insignificant piece of the puzzle so we can advance to the next level. Considering all of the amazing games we've seen for the Dreamcast over the past year, we're not going to be happy with puzzles that test our patience instead of our minds. Even if it takes hours, solving a puzzle that was well thought out can be rewarding and ultimately addictive because of that "oh, I should have thought about that" feeling we get when we do figure them out. When the answer to the riddle is "oh, I should have walked through this dark corner of this room 30 more times, or tried knocking down this wall instead of that one," the frustration at the amount of time wasted overshadows any pleasure one might derive from solving the puzzle in the first place.

We were excited about this game because we had heard from G.O.D. (Gathering of Developers) that Psycho Circus would allow the most AI enemies on one screen of any game in history. "Surely this will make the game interesting," we thought. But when the enemies spawn from seemingly randomly placed portals and merely rush into the barrel of your gun, they get annoying as well. The only way to stop these little buggers is to shoot their portal, but just to get to it usually requires at least one life.

Oh yeah, and there's no KISS. While we're certainly not the biggest KISS fans in the world, we expected to see at least a little more of the band's imagery and hear a little more of its music than the vague KISS references scattered throughout the game.

We could go on and on, ad infinitum, but why bother? Six months ago, Psycho Circus would have been a great game to buy for the Dreamcast, because there were no other shooters. Now that we have Quake III and Unreal, Half-Life and Soldier of Fortune (to name a few) on the way, what's the point in buying a shooter that doesn't even include multiplayer? That's right, no multiplayer. The most simple, and perhaps the most important aspect of any first-person shooter has been entirely left out of Nightmare Child for the Dreamcast. So how can we possibly review a shooter that has no deathmatch? Here's how: We simply say it sucks and go back to playing Quake III online.

Bottom Line: Not horrible, but bad, KISS Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child would be a good buy for the die-hard FPS fan who owns a Dreamcast and has already bought or prepaid for every other shooter on the system.