A New Beginning: Final Cut

The New Beginning makes a great first impression, with gorgeous artwork and a well-executed comic book style that reminds me of XIII. The gameplay is classic point & click, with two playable characters and an easy to understand interface. The puzzles are generally logical and well-integrated with the plot, but one or two of them do stand out as being overly obtuse. Thankfully, the game offers a 'skip' button for the trickier puzzles, which is a great addition for players who just want to get on with the story. As other reviews have noted, the storyline is focused on climate change, and can at times feel overbearingly moralizing. Anyone who is likely to find this irritating would do best to stay away. For everyone else, the plot is largely well put together and entertaining. The biggest let-down for me was the voice acting, which is some of the worst I've experienced. Nearly all of the actors have a stilted, robotic delivery, and many of the lines are misread. There are also a number of typographical errors in the text, and a handful of places where the text is in the wrong language entirely, but thankfully none of these interfered too much with the game. The game also suffers from a handful of annoying bugs, but I didn't encounter anything show-stopping. Overall, I do recommend the game to fans of the genre, particularly if you enjoy pleasing background art, but beware of the problems above.

The image quality looked great, the story wasn't. I just couldn't take the politicaly correct preaching.

It looked so good. The visuals were stunning. And then the dialogue started. The poorly acted (English setting), preachy dialogue. And then there were the tedious puzzles in the beginning. Perhaps this gets better in a later act - I do not know, and perhaps I'm being unfair. But, frankly, after the start (and reading a few reviews to see if it seemed to get better), I couldn't be bothered. If the beginning is anything to go by, this is beautiful, preachy and extremely linear. Judging by the reviews, it continues to be beautiful, preachy and extremely linear. Get Broken Sword instead. Or Monkey Island special edition.

Characters are boring and flat. Game is very annoying and political . Graphically it's not bad, so for that two stars. Stay away.

This game does have solid artwork and fair, though not perfect, animations. However, the dialogue is terrible, slow paced and unnatural as well as poorly voice acted. In addition, the environmentalist angle is excessively preachy and is populated primarily by captain planet-esque villains nearly too ridiculous to be believed. The story is somewhat salvaged near the very end, but getting to that point is rather tedious. Fortunately, the puzzles are well done. Little pixel hunting or off the wall solutions, most of the puzzles can be solved with patience, logical thought, and attention to the environment. Despite this however, I personally found the overall game disappointing.