Your Privates Will Thank You

Interesting choice of helmets...

I have heard about Zombie Cow Studios' Privates for a while now and I had even downloaded the game late last month but I kept forgetting to install and play it. This completely free title for the Personal Computer is a hilarious precautionary tale about sexually transmitted diseases made into a video game. You control a group of small army men tasked to destroy STDs at the most interesting locations of the human body. You only control the leader of the squad directly while the three other team members are computer-controlled. The game is a side-scrolling shooter and you have 4 different weapons to use in your arsenal.

Get up close and personal with the most notorious of STDs.

I have played through 3 of the game's 5 stages and though everything is hilarious, the game itself is average at best. The great thing about this game is that it took the lighter approach in presenting the subject matter by using cartoonish graphics and silly-looking monsters to represent the worse of STDs. Those with weak stomachs would probably still feel a bit of a nausea with all the talks about bodily fluids and orifices. There are spoken dialogues in the game that accompanies each mission and they really keep you engaged and shocked. I suppose the blunt sexual conversations and the dry British humor may not be for everybody but I found them to be very funny. The graphics are beautiful (I mean, disgusting) with a lot of the locations being cleverly imaginative. It's a shame that the game's perfect presentation is betrayed by the haphazard play mechanics. The AI that manages your teammates is pretty useless thus they die for reasons beyond your control. The enemy type changes so frequently that switching between the weapons becomes more frustrating than it is fun. Sticking with just one weapon type would have made the game a bit more focused.

Don't play this game before having a romantic evening.

If you are living in a free society where consensual sex between two adults is not forbidden by the law or god or both, you know that safe sex is a must. If you are one of those people who are not very careful in your sexual life, this game may give you some pause in regards to your inaction. It's great to see that such a strong message can be delivered with such an impact via a video game. It's too bad that the game is just not polished enough to warrant multiple plays. If you are interested in the game, you can download it by clicking here.

They are hard to destroy, just like their real life counterparts.

FIRST IMPRESSION: 3 out of 5