This is not a terrible game. It's not even a bad or mediocre game. It even slightly tilts towards "good" but the bitter knowledge of knowing it could have been so much better is really the biggest problem. The premise is this: you're a sniper who has to complete objectives on an open map while taking out enemy units and avoid getting spotted. Sounds great, doesn't it? In fact, I love sniping and this seemed like a game worth trying! There's even added realism like bullet drop across distances, heart rate, lung capacity, etc. which all influence your sniping capabilities. A great recipe for a great game! ... except Rebellion messed it up while cooking. Let's start with the problems. 1. the areas are littered with impassable areas with invisible walls. Most buildings are for show and can't be entered which is ridiculous considering that's what snipers do. 2. you don't feel like a proper sniper. While the tutorial vid shows how much you need to sneak, in reality, you can mostly run around gunning them down with a machine gun without a problem. Most encounters are at mid-range anyway where machine guns just work quicker. Even when sniping, things felt wrong. You can reload without having to stop looking through your scope for example and reloading is very fast. 3. Scripted sequences. This is the One, the big flaw that make the two points above look like tiny inconveniences. It's just NOT right for enemies to spawn into place after certain triggers. You can run over an entire map and not encounter a single soldier, then talk to someone and suddenly the place is crawling with them again. It makes a mockery of your efforts to scout the map first. Not only that but several scripted sequences are designed in such a way that the game forces close encounters upon you which, for a game called "Sniper Elite" is ridiculous. 4. If you're not looking through the scope, you're in third person view which is a mistake. For starters, it allows you to look around corners without having to actually move around them. It takes away the tension of seeing if there's a sniper on a roof somewhere while risking getting shot. Why not make it a proper FPS game? The tension a game like this should create is absent because you feel distanced from your character. 5. The game lacks polish. There's so many small flaws left and right that make it feel like this was a console game. Actually, hold on *goes to look on Mobygames* Oh wait, it WAS a console game - that explains things! For starters, the options menu is terrible and bugged, the graphics are mediocre for a game of its age (do realise that Half Life 2 and Far Cry were both released many months before this game was) and worst of all, your character moves at times as if he was wading through jelly. In the end, this is a game that could have been brilliant IF they had made it a FPS, if they had thrown out the ridiculous spawning, if they had polished the scripts, if they had made sniping feel more authentic, if if if if ... but they didn't and so this is a slight-better-than-mediocre game. If I had to give a percentage it would be 65%. In the end, it doesn't live up to its name and that's what will disappoint people the most.
Read my score as 3.5/5 - 4/5 was too much and 3/5 was too little. Syberia is a game I really disliked when I first played it and to be fair, the reasons for this are still there - it's just a matter of forgiving them. For example, the interface is annoying and unnecessarily clunky, the characters you talk to are mostly dull, the backdrops are far too static and cold, the animation is pretty average, etc. You may say "but that's all superficial stuff!" but then I'd say "not for an adventure game". Despite these shortcomings, the game has good puzzles, the main character is quite interesting and the plot does get interesting as well and these things drag the game away from becoming like a classic Cryo disaster. As the game moves on, you learn to forgive its shortcomings but it still falls short of being a classic in all areas. It's just too lifeless and static in its locations (not to mention the 3D design feels cold and too unconvincing). Still, 3.5/5 is not a bad score.
(note this is just for the first game) Most games I play I can easily shove in a "good" or "bad" corner but Blade of Destiny is a tough nut to crack. It took me 2 days to read up on the game before I could actually start playing it and having now completed it, 4 days later, I'm not sure whether I really enjoyed the trip or not. Blade of Destiny is called, by many, a "hardcore RPG" meaning it's supposed to be very deep, complex, full of stats, etc. Okay, it HAS a ton of stats but sadly enough, many of them are vague and some don't even do anything! With over 50 skills and very limited skillpoints, it becomes a game of pure guesswork to determine what skills you should focus on. The manual is entirely unhelpful because it doesn't actually state which skills will be used the most. If they had trimmed the fat and had cut out all these skills which are only used one or twice in the entire game, it would have been a far more enjoyable experience instead of giving gamers a headache trying to figure out how to make the best party. In the end, it doesn't really matter that much because even if you lack a skill, there's usually ways around it but, of course, the manual doesn't tell you this either. Basically, before you play this game, I'd recommend you read any helpful website to get an idea what the game is about, what skills to focus on, what items to focus on, etc. because otherwise, you're going to get buried beneath tons of useless loot. Most of the stuff sold in stores seems useless and with your inventory being so limited in space and carrying more than a few weapons seriously slowing you down in combat, you'll end up just ditching everything but rations and weapons. I know I did. But once you get past all this crud, you're left with a raw diamond of a game. Combat is very satisfying and tactical and there's a LOT of it and there's a lot of little detail to the game like random events. You can sell and buy in different stores, there's actual seasons that affect where you can travel to, you can take a boat to cut corners off your travels, there's side quests and lots of caves & dungeons for you to loot and, generally, there's a lot to this game considering its age. Still, even here I can't stop to criticize: the game is completely user-unfriendly for dozens of reasons. Besides how intransparent the skill system is, navigating cities is a nightmare as well, with vital NPCs being in unmarked houses so you end up knocking on every unmarked door just in case an important person lives there. If a city contains 50 houses, this easily takes 15 minutes for a city. Good thing you get the Hint Book with this game which has maps of all cities - USE IT! But that's not all: it's well possible to get stuck with no way of completing the game by doing normal things but picking the wrong things to say. And how about magic items which look identical to normal items and even have the same name! I had three swords in my inventory at one time and one was magical yet I had to use identification spells to discover which was. Or how about in dungeons: picking the wrong hallway once got me stuck with no way of getting out, AT ALL. In general, what people call "hardcore" is really a game being very unforgiving and expecting the player to figure out how everything works with barely any clue and a LOT of trail and error. If this game had had a 300 page manual that carefully explained what most items were for, the ingredients for alchemy (dear god, I spent an hour just to discover what I needed to have to make a potion. If you pick up a recipe, isn't it SUPPOSED to tell you what ingredients you need?) and so many other things like the real use of skills & spells for starters. In the end this is a very rough diamond. For its age it's amazingly complex but it still saddens me to see so many crucial mistakes being made. This game would have been a tremendous classic if it didn't leave you hanging in the air so many times. Even the walkthroughs I find are full of lines like "I never discovered if skill A or spell B had any use" which is not encouraging. Heck, there's even evidence inside the game that the game was meant to be a lot more complex but my guess is that they removed a lot of functionality (or decided against adding it) because it would complicate the game too much which is ironic since leaving all the useless baggage behind does exactly that. Except for the fun combat, there's a lot of rough corners on this game. If you got the patience, it's still worth playing but be sure to use Google to track down every piece of advice you can find!
Phantasmagoria is in my top 5 of worst games I ever played (and I've played thousands). I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me, but if you look at reviews of the time, you'll see many agreed. A few examples of why it's a poor game to me: - it has 7 CDs yet it takes maybe 3 hours to complete: on those 7 CDs there's nowhere near as much content as you'd believe because most content is repeated on all 7 CDs - "puzzles" consist of going from room A to room B to watch a new clip being played. Aside from this, there's only a handful of items you can pick up and use in the entire game and the function of most is very obvious - There's very little logic to the game. The events are triggered in order so if you have to go to room B, you won't be able to do ANYTHING until you go to room B. And there's no reason WHY you should go to room B so you end up going to all rooms until you trigger the next event or .. you can "cheat" and ask for a hint. Seriously, to me this is the anti-game. It's a disgrace as an adventure game yet certain people still love the game for its horror elements. It's a good game for starting adventure gamers though - if they don't mind terrible acting and cheesy horror sequences but be warned: this is a lot worse than Gabriel Knight Beast Within which uses the same engine. That game was huge, had interesting locations and characters, proper acting, lots of items and puzzles. This game has none of those.
The first time I tried this game, I was not that impressed. I feared it was yet another Myst clone with irrelevant puzzles and little story to back it up. How wrong I was ... In truth, this is a brilliant horror adventure games which will put you on the edge of your seat. The attention to detail is amazing and while the game is slow to get going, after an hour of playing, you'll have a hard time to stop playing! This game is really a hidden gem of massive proportions.
