Sherlock Holmes Chapter One

The story is good, I liked it and I feel like it fits with the canon in harmony, but that's about when it ends with things that are done flawlessly Voice acting and music are also good but hit and miss sometimes. Combat is bad and honestly I don't know why it's even in the game I skipped all of it, which is nice that they let you do so. There are some performance issues but nothing too serious and not letting you see if you did the right or wrong choice is something that should've never made it past first conceptions. While we're on that, most of the detective work was too easy and the higher difficulty mode only made gameplay annoying, not harder. 70% of the time I could see who done it before I even collected half of the evidence. To sum it up for every right thingt his game does, it does something bad, it suffers from its ambitious reach and I hope the developers won't be put downn if this entry wasn't as succesful as they would hope, I think they can make great sherlock games if they take it easier.

Shouldn't have been released in it's current state. Lagged more than any game I've ever played. Opening the menu sometimes took full several minutes, if it opened at all. You'd open it and then just sit there waiting for it to pop up, sometimes having to go into a building to make it finally open (I'm guessing the game is just so large that it had trouble loading the outside map AND the casebook at the same time). Running through the city crashes the game, cause it's so large and badly rendered-- you literally walk off the map. Combat was awful-- skipped everytime. The music and voice acting skips terribly like bad records-- sometimes the scenes end before the voice overs can finish so they get cut off. And none of the cases are solvable without following a walkthrough, or in my case, several different ones. On that last note: none of the crimes have TRUE ANSWERS. You could literally choose any answer and the game pretty much agrees with you that you chose correct... What's the point of a mystery solving game if all answers are the right ones? Not enough instructions on how you're supposed to do anything in any part of the game (so you're just lost trying to guess where to go in a real city sized map). Sometimes, Jon just lies to you and tells you there's more to find, when in reality you found everything (in every walkthrough I used, which was about 5, I found everything they did, but for some reason Jon would tell me I'm missing stuff, and I truly wasn't). And the disguise part of the game was unneccessary and unfun-- too hard to figure out what disguise you need, and if you buy the wrong things, you can run out of MONEY, so you gotta do sidequests so you can afford to get more clothes. I dreaded doing anything BUT the mainstory line (which was guard-railed by walkthroughs the whole way due to being impossibly difficult), as I was fed up with every case not having a clear culprit. I'm glad its over. Story was good, so it's a pity the gameplay was so awful.

It's not the high point of Crimes and Punishments, but it's a really interesting and fun reboot. I don't exactly care for the overarching story, but the moment to moment gameplay is engaging. I thought the open world worked well after an hour or so. It lets you figure out where to go on the map and you can disguise yourself to get info from different kinds of people. Older games in the series had those ideas lightly, but they start working here.

The story seems interesting, gameplay deduction acceptable, but it still have a outdated design issue. Walk into the water too deep, you reappear somewhere else. Cannot swim? Same area (looking for an escaped animal in the forest), next to the water: invisible wall. Hey, year 2001 is calling and asking that you return their brand new 3D engine! In the end, quite often, you do not know if you cannot do something because of a strange limitation or if it is because you failed to do a prerequisite step. Same area, cannot check the pocket of a jacket oddly lost in the forest with keys in the pocket: the character in examination mode apparently cannot lower his nose. Frankly, I think previous Frogware of the series felt less confusing.

The plot seems good so far, but the game engine is terrible. From an Unreal implementation I'd expected far better looks and outcomes, but the movement are sometimes cranky, the character bodies are approximate at best and the game controls and mechanics (especially the combat QTE) are absolutely awful. Unless, at least, the controls are fixed, I wouldn't recommend it...