J.U.L.I.A. Among the Stars

I will not be very different from other reviews - this is really nice, in general, game which i personally wanted to play long time ago and i still think it worth it. We got pretty nice UI, a lo of moderately complex puzzles, some quite interesting, albeit some i found to be rather annoying and just too tedious to play with, like that "learn language" minigame. Plot is also interesting enough, at least before approximately second half of game when things starts to go fast and tear huge holes in whole plot. Too much of obvious question without any attempts to answer them - where is another Earth ships? How much incompetent was peoples who sent mission? Why they all was so stupid to notice obvious? "Unexpected Twist" in plot is rather clearly obvious and in very end you presented with two equally bad endings. Oh well, at least overall design is pretty good. Is it worth your time? I guess so, but if you hardcore Sci-fi fan you may be disappointed.

I'm not a fan of point and click adventures, but this one was enjoyable. I bought it on a whim (on sale) and was pleasantly surprised. The puzzles ranged from very easy to pretty complicated, but I eventually solved all but one without resorting to the hint book. One of the things I hate abut most point and click adventures is trying to hunt for pixels to click on, but this game has a button you can press to make all the hots spots highlight for a few moments - very helpful. Pros: Comes with a Hint book (in PDF format) to help you if you get stuck on puzzles. Nice musical score that changes by the environment you are in. Good story that builds towards a few surprises, with a few red herrings thrown in to make you worry. Combination of animations and 2D background images blends well. Game autosaves regularly, but also has plenty of manual save slots available. You get a chance to play each ending from your last autosave, so you can see what might have happened if you chose differently. Cons: The Hint book actually has a misprinted page where it repeats itself for a previous puzzle, instead of the one you are looking up. There are one or two places where an icon shows a place to click, but it isn't possible to click it. (bugged) These didn't prevent you from completing the story, just wasted a bit of my time trying to figure it out. This was the reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5. All in all, a good solid sci-fi adventure with a female hero and a mystery to solve.

At first, I tried this game out in german. But the synchronization is poor. I got the feeling, this were 3rd class actors imitating a robot voice, or what they thought in the 80s or 90s, a robot voice must sound like. Then I switched to english and got a little hope since the robot voices sounded more like'em with less hall effect and more robotic distortion. But that hope disappeared very soon: the comments of Rachel, JULIA and MOBOT about the interactive pieces in every scene felt very simple minded and just stupid. We have one astrobiologist and two highly developed artificial intelligences and the writers didn't even try to sound scientific. The scenes' hotspots are described in a way, preschoolers would do so. Every piece lying on the floor is witness for an unbelievably tragic catastrophy, although there could be dozens of other reasons. Another example: Mobot gives a comment about the dead surface of Xenophon. It goes like "this must haven been a nuclear explosion, 100 times worse than the biggest nuclear bomb on earth at departure". Very scientific and precise... that I would expect from a childrens' book. Since there is not much else concerning gameplay or graphics, this might be the first time, I regret a purchase on GOG. Okay, I didn't try a lot of puzzles, except for the first one, when you need to extinguish all the fires aboard ship. And these were no puzzles, just trial and error clicking. Only upside: first time I saw GOG achievements via overly. totally cool.

Well done game, with a fun story line. Puzzles are sometimes a bit too much try and error, repeat. But for the price a few hours of good fun.

Combines two of my favorite game types: adventure and sci-fi. It's a classic point-and-click adventure game with a great story. The game is longer and more complicated than I expected, and that's a good thing. Great game, well worth the purchase.