This is the review I wrote; as you can see it uses up nearly all of the 3,000 characters GamersGate allows for user reviews:
Vivisector is an arcade-styled first-person shooter that is very loosely based on The Island of Doctor Moreau: you play a lowly soldier sent to the tropical island of Isla Sorna to investigate the disappearance of some people, and soon find yourself caught in a battle for survival against enemy soldiers and "humanimals," creatures that are part man and part animal, the results of scientific experiments.
While based on a piece of classic literature, the plot in Vivisector can't hold up to close scrutiny: there are lots of holes and inconsistencies.
Vivisector is best described as Far Cry crossed with Serious Sam: you make your way through open jungle areas and enclosed military and scientific facilities battling enemies, who often attack en masse. The game is very much an arcade shooter in that it allows you carry over a dozen weapons that don't ever need to be reloaded. While most FPS games these days try and be more realistic, Vivisector is happy to relive the old-school run and gun Doom days. There's a bit of an RPG element that allows you to increase your health, armor, and weapon stats, but no one is going to confuse this with Deus Ex.
Vivisector doesn't really do anything new, but it does enough things right to make it enjoyable for FPS fans: there are lots of big guns, lots of enemies to shoot, a few boss battles, and the game is fairly lengthy. The levels are varied and many of them are quite elaborately designed, making them interesting to look at and explore.
Like in Serious Sam and Painkiller, enemies will frequently warp in around you, making you stay on your toes. Annoyingly, the designers often have monsters spawn five feet in front of you or behind you when you cross invisible triggers, which leads to lots of cheap deaths. This more prevalent in the early stages of the game than it is later on, but it's still cheap.
The design of the enemies in Vivisector is quite interesting, with some good-looking animal-human hybrids. The animations on the creatures are good, and the individual monsters contain lots of detail. Vivisector also has a "vivisection" feature that allows you to blow chunks of armor, skin, and flesh off enemies; it's good-looking effect, but it's for appearances only: enemies can keep attacking unhindered even after you've blown all the meat off their bones and have reduced them to little more than walking, gun-toting skeletons. It looks a bit silly.
Technically Vivisector is done well, with good visuals and sound. The graphics aren't cutting-edge, but are solid and detailed, and outside of some hammy voice-acting and generic "battle music" the audio portion of the game is respectable. The game is relatively bug-free too, although a couple of minor errors were encountered.
Like many modern first-person games, Vivisector doesn't have much replay value, and since there's no multiplayer, once you've finished the campaign there's little reason to play the game again. Still, it's a fun enough romp while it lasts.
Here's a gameplay video I made:
http://vimeo.com/1292127