When it even runs at all it freezes after a few minutes. I've tried the troubleshooting suggestions but they haven't helped. Thankfully it was a freebie and I didn't pay for it.
I played the original Blood Omen and loved it, though I missed out of the Soul Reaver games, so I was looking forward to getting back into that dark, gothic fantasy world. And while there seems to be a really solid fantasy adventure game in here, it's rendered almost unplayable due to the most insane camera system I think I've ever seen in a video game. It's cinematic rather than the more sensible third-person view most games of this type go for and it never stays still. It's constantly swooping, spinning, pulling back, lowering the ground and suddenly switching viewpoints on you. It loves to show your character from the side or, even worse, from the front so you can't see what's directly in front of you. You know, things like 90 degree turns, traps, enemies... At first this just makes navigating the environments a confusing chore, as each camera change also changes the context of the controls, so you can run into a room then immediately run back out as pushing forwards now means you go backwards but when you get to the tricky platforming bits it's just an exercise in frustration. Often you can't see where you're supposed to jump to, or you can't effectively judge the distance or height of the next platform. Sometimes the camera even switches mid-jump, again changing the controls and sending you plummeting to your death because you're now pushing the wrong direction on the controller. Even the simplest jumps can be matters of pure luck. There's a patch which is supposed to install a normal third-person camera but every copy I downloaded set off my anti-virus software, so that wasn't an option. A lot of people seem to have enjoyed Defiance and managed to play it ok, but I couldn't recommend it myself and I'm glad I only paid a couple of pounds for it in a sale.
On first impressions, Far Cry seems like it's going to be a hell of a lot of fun. Lots of people have talked about the quality of the graphics but it's the setting that really impressed me. Running around tropical islands, gunfights among the ruins of WWII defences, sneaking around the rusting hulk of an old ship, crawling through the jungle sniping guards off the towers at a military base, hang-gliding between islands...great stuff. Unfortunately it doesn't last. Pretty soon you'll be fighting sci-fi mutant enemies who can leap vast distances and kill you with a couple of hits, or soak up damage like brick walls while firing constant streams of rockets at you. They're deadly in the open outdoor environments but fighting them in the enclosed spaces of laboratories and maze-like ruins can be unbelievably unfair. But then many shooters from this era suffered from brutal difficulty levels and I'm still a fan of them, so what makes Far Cry so irritating? One massive, face-palmingly awful design decision. Checkpoints. Yes, you don't get to choose when you save the game. All those incredibly difficult encounters I mentioned? You don't get to beat them, save and move on, you get to play them over and over again. Spend half an hour crawling through the jungle picking off enemies only to get blasted apart from a rocket launcher 1000 yards away? Tough, you're doing it all again. Reach a checkpoint with low health and armour so you have to backtrack for supplies? You'll be doing that backtrack twenty or thirty times. As the spaces between checkpoints get longer, the enemies get tougher and you're forced through the gauntlet of overwhelmingly difficult and badly designed set-pieces the game simply stops being any kind of fun whatsoever. Progress is an utter chore – the whole second half the game is nothing but an exercise in frustration. It was only sheer bloody-mindedness that kept me going at all, though I finally gave up close to the end. And that was only playing of Medium difficulty. There are three more levels above that. So yeah, there was potential here but it was utterly squandered by the checkpoint system and some truly rotten level design. Unless you're a real gaming masochist I'd avoid this one, I'm afraid.
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is generally considered to be one of the greatest point and click adventures of all time. If true, it's a telling indictment of why the adventure game genre almost died out and is kept hobbling along these days by the life support machine of indie developers and hardcore fans. First of all, the good. The story is excellent, revolving around murder and voodoo practises in New Orleans. There's a huge amount of well-researched detail about voodoo and most of the cast, especially the main characters are well-written, interesting and charismatic. The quality voice acting helps here enormously. Another plus is that you need to complete all the day's tasks before the game will move on, so there doesn't seem to be any chance of falling into that old adventure game nightmare of finding the game uncompletable after days of play because you overlooked something back at the very start. The problems come with the actual gameplay and while this might read as a bit of a rant against adventure games in general, it's all relevant to Gabriel Knight. My first big beef is that the game requires you to behave in the most illogical manner possible. You're constantly lying, betraying people's trust and stealing from friends and strangers, even when you have no in-character reason to do so because it's the only way to move the game forward or get items you'll need to use days later. Need to trick a devoutly religious old woman into letting you into her home? Hey, it's lucky you stole that priest's outfit from the church and have been carrying it around for two days for no good reason whatsoever. Backgrounds are detailed with descriptions for most things you can see. Unfortunately, now and then a seemingly innocuous background item is the key to a puzzle solution or opens up a dialogue option you need to progress so every single thing on every single screen needs clicked on with the look icon, then the take icon, then the operate icon, then the open icon...just in case it turns out to be usable or relevant. Miss something like this early and later you can be left with no idea what your next objective is, wandering back through all the locations trying to find something you might have overlooked. The other problem with these games is the often illogical puzzles. It might have seemed perfectly obvious to the designer that the way to distract a certain character was to get a mime from two screens away to follow you back to annoy them, but to me it wasn't even clear that the certain character needed distracted in the first place, let alone that the mime was anything other than background colour like all the other musicians and street performers in that area. I expect a lot of people would argue that what I see as problems are just classic genre tropes. I'd argue back that sticking to these genre tropes is why so many people gave up buying adventure games. Unlike other genres, adventures didn't evolve better gameplay mechanics and suffered as a result. So, the story is excellent and involving but the actual game play is little more than a frustrating chore. This is par for the course for this type of game, unfortunately, and you'll probably know if this appeals to you or not. If it does, then sure, this is a classic. If it doesn't but you like good story driven games it's well worth picking up cheap and keeping a walkthrough or hint guide at hand to help you past the worst of the design problems.
