Boiling Point: Road to Hell

2026-04-26
A commander hands me a wad of pesos and tells me my next job: euthanize the doctor who created the drugs. Counting my money, I step outside expecting to take my trusty red truck but it's gone--I left my daughter's car at the crime scene and drove the truck back, which means I'm decidedly car-less. I remember there's a man here who will pay me to drive buses between the military base and the town nearby for a pittance. I sign up and a fresh new bus awaits me. Needless to say, a bus full of bullet holes is soon to be driven away from the site of a certain doctor's demise. I take the same bus to kill an entire convoy of guerrillas on the way home. The Bus Driver Killer. Hey, when you're in Realia you work with what you got, gringo.

That moment is Boiling Point in a nutshell. A game about improvising because it's left you no other choice, and finding out that the improvised solution is way more fun than anything it planned for you. People call this Far Cry. They are wrong. This is what happens when STALKER and Deadly Premonition have a horrible little child prone to seizures. It has that same Ukrainian-dev DNA as STALKER where you start off dying in every encounter immediately and then you get some money, get some gear, and suddenly with your fully upgraded AUG in hand you can take out anyone anywhere. It feels good. The systems quietly stacking underneath it all: get shot in the leg and your camera wobbles when you walk. Drive drunk and it's actually easier to steer than it is to walk in a straight line. Carry too much and your speed tanks non-linearly. You can bribe your way through entire story missions if you have the scratch. It's a janky little ecosystem that produces moments you couldn't script.

The problem is everything between those moments. Boiling Point is a big open world where you spend half the time behind the wheel with no radio, no GTA-style distractions, and enough nothing between objectives to make you question your hobbies. Your car is your only storage, which becomes a real problem when a mission has you stealing a helicopter and dropping it off halfway across the map. Now you either buy a new car or spend ten minutes walking back to your old one. That's not emergent gameplay. That's drudgery. Morrowind had the same problem, but it gave you Jeremy Soule's soaring soundtrack, a pile of dungeons between here and Balmora, and a million skills ticking up under your feet. Here the drive back is just the drive back, past the same trees popping in and the same infinitely respawning mafia and military spilling out of them, caught in an eternal war over a patch of poorly paved and poorly rendered road.

It's the bugs of the jungle that really kill it though. The perennial save corruption that meant I had to manually back up the entire save directory every 15 minutes--and still ate hours of progress. The crashes. The random one enemy deified by broken code that meant he was utterly and inexplicably unkillable and led me to turn on god mode and feel no shame about it. A boat that, no matter how many times I reloaded, wouldn't release me--forcing me to reload to a save from before I'd even boarded. And as a perfect capstone to all of this, the final cutscene, the payoff for everything you endured, plays out in complete silence. No sound effects for the destruction of the doomsday device. Just a silent explosion and the credits.

I love jank. And Boiling Point is the jankiest game I've played in 20 years. And at first when you park your car and it starts floating around the road in a circle with no driver it seems like good jank, a burn that you like, like a shot of smooth tequila. But then you get the worm: the game crashes, you lose an hour of progress, you get soft-locked out of a mission. And then you realize it's all worm, no tequila. That you are the worm. In one of your brief moments of lucidity you delete Boiling Point: Road to Hell. "I should have just went to fuckin' Belize."