Poor weapons and a shortage of ammo removes much of the rest. Every device of destruction in the game aside from the underpowered rat-a-tat-tat Zero Cannon is marked with a pause that makes it tough to really get into the "rip 'em apart" mindset. The Magma Cannon, for example, is extremely powerful, but takes a full second or two to rotate to a fresh round between blasts. This makes it very tough to employ when you're being gooned by the standard Spawner crowd, as you'll absorb a hit or two between each shot. Making matters even worse is a severe shortage of ammo that completely unbalances the game on normal difficulty. I ended up having to race through a lot of levels relying only on speed and my melee weapon. This is a serious screw-up on the part of Third Law. Pure blood and guts gameplay with piles of enemies should be accompanied with piles of ammo. The last thing I want to think about while mowing down a crowd of demons is running out of shells.

KISS Psycho Circus is powered by a tweaked version of Monolith's LithTech engine last seen two years ago in SHOGO: Mobile Armor Division and Blood II. Despite this, the visuals aren't as dated as you might expect. Textures are fairly rough in comparison to more modern titles like Quake III and Unreal Tournament, but the designers used a widely varied color palette to disguise this flaw quite well in most cases. The surrealistic cartoon feel of the levels also helps. Better yet, LithTech manages to handle more than a dozen enemies on screen simultaneously without slowing down. My frame rate chugged along steadily whether I was facing a horde of the Headless or a single Ballbuster. I was also able to play the game at an astounding 1600x1200 resolution with no hitches. Sure, this was only at 16-bit color (which is all the game can handle, despite the presence of a 32-bit option in the setup screens), but still. You'll never see Quake III do something like that.