Boiling Point: Road to Hell

An open-world shooter by Ukranian developer Deep Shadows. Notorious for its technical issues.
 PC

Story

Meet Saul Meyers
Meet Saul Meyers

Saul Meyers is an ex-soldier who gets a message from a friend that his daughter has been kidnapped. Meyers' daughter had been travelling to hotspots of political upheaval around the world, documenting the struggles of the locals, and she was in Puerto Rico when she was kidnapped. He sets out to rescue her by any means necessary.

Gameplay

Boom!
Boom!

Boiling Point is an open-world shooter with RPG elements and a faction system. The game contains many different factions that the player is free to ally with, including citizens, the mayor, police, mafia, bandits, guerillas, and the military.

Reception

The reception to Boiling Point was generally negative. Players cited unfulfilled gameplay mechanics, inept AI, and many serious bugs and stability issues. Save games would occasionally and at random corrupt themselves, rendering them unloadable. The game often crashed to desktop for many players, sometimes so often that it prevented progress in the storyline.

The most criticized aspect, however, was the AI:

  • NPCs that follow the player during a mission may walk into traffic, run into the player's line of fire, throw grenades at their own feet, get mauled by animals, or drown in creeks, causing the player to fail a non-repeatable mission and possibly halting story progression.
  • Civilians may die by walking into entirely stationary parked cars, causing armed locals to become hostile towards the player.
  • Upon sighting the player, hostile factions ignore any other threats including bees, jaguars, snakes, and other hostile NPCs.
  • Parking cars in a bus depot will cause them to explode when the bus arrives, killing anyone in the bus or the area around the explosions.
  • NPCs who pilot helicopters or planes continually crash into each other in the air and explode.
  • Shooting some NPCs in the head will cause them to disappear without death animation.
  • Police and military will shoot civilians if they become hostile to the player.
  • Jungle cats often do not enter their animation for chasing the player, and instead float above the ground at high speed in their default model state.
  • Hostile NPCs can accurately shoot the player through solid objects, such as doors, trees, and bushes, and can also shoot through small gaps in the level geometry.