If you really love point and click adventure games, chances are you've played some games that are worse than this, and others which are much, much better. The writing isn't great. Most of the comedy consists of pop culture references of one kind or another. The voice acting is decent, but nothing to write home about. The puzzles are decent; they run the usual gamut from easy to unintuitive, but there aren't any that stick out in my mind as being especially clever or interesting. The visuals are... also okay. Ceville's fairy-tale esque style has everyone looking like a caricature of whatever they're supposed to be. Sometimes it's interesting, but most of the time you'll probably be taking it for granted. I'm given to understand that this game is better in German. If, unlike me, you speak German, perhaps that makes this game worth a try. For the rest of us, I suggest you shop around more for a good place to drop ten dollars.
I'll skip giving a detailed review and get straight to pointing out the single most serious problem this game has: infinite enemy respawn. Whenever you move a certain distance away from an area full of enemies, that area repopulates. The passage of time is irrelevant; if you were gone for an hour or a minute, everything will be reset as if you were never there. This means that you can never travel anywhere in peace. You will be constantly shot at by pretty much everyone you meet everywhere you go. Add in a level design that practically forces you to go through enemy-filled checkpoints in order to go anywhere, and you've got a recipe for a very fatiguing game. You never get a break; you're always either fighting or moving to another fight. My advice: invest in a grenade launcher and webbing to carry more grenades. The constant firefighting will be easier if you can just blow everything up.
Dreamfall is one of those games that suffers from trying to do too many different things at once, and doing none of them particularly well. If you really loved The Longest Journey, you won't find that Dreamfall is a really comparable game, or a good game in its own right. People expecting a pure adventure game in particular will be surprised and disappointed, because this game is not that. Most of the puzzles are of the stupidly easy "Go to a place, talk to a person, and bring back their item" variety, and the only puzzles that aren't are terribly counterintuitive (like the one puzzle in a cave that requires you to remember a sequence of musical notes that some of the cave beasts periodically whistle... if they're not attacking you). There is also a (poorly implemented) fighting mechanic in this game, and many fights are totally unavoidable. There are also mandatory stealth sections that are similarly unavoidable. There is no exploration to speak of; the game is more or less entirely linear, and going to locations out of the plot-dictated order is neither beneficial nor interesting. The game uses a checkpoint-based saving system, which is a bane to all gamers. It also inherits a flaw from TLJ, in that it takes a very long time to walk anywhere. Tack on a few quick-time events, and overall the gameplay becomes very unsatisfying. The continuity with TLJ is mostly quite weak. Some of the characters you'll remember from TLJ are present, but they are not given nearly as much screen-time as the new heroine, Zoe, and the characters she interacts with. The plot is oddly disconnected from the events of TLJ; the plot hooks left over from that game are mostly unaddressed in this game. For that matter, the plot and writing in general are a bit on the weak side, and the game ends on a tremendous cliffhanger. The visuals are reasonably good, but NOT for the time this game was released (2006). In particular, the character animations are sub-par; spend some time looking at Zoe's waggly pony-tail waving around like some kind of tentacle and you'll understand the problem. The music is unmemorable, and so is most of the voice acting. As I played through this game, I found myself thinking that it was much more like an interactive movie than an actual game, but it didn't have the sort of strong story that a interactive movie must have in order to be entertaining. I found myself annoyed whenever the game prompted me to do something, feeling like I was jumping through hoops to advance the plot instead of having fun with the gameplay sequences. In short, this is not a good game. The positive reviewers clearly had a very different experience from me, but I do not think my impression is a unique one. Do not pay any amount of money to play this.
