Sanitarium is a moderately interesting point and click adventure. most of the game is going around collecting the items that allow you to proceed, usuallyb y talking to a bunch of people. The good : The voice acting is generally good, the story is weird and will take to to many twisted and bizarre places. The bad: movement is slow and clumsy. some levels require an "action" sequence with can be difficult do to the aforementioned controls. Sometimes you know exactly what you want but are missing a small detail that you hadn't clicked thus getting stuck. The Ugly: Crash , Crash, Crash. I came very close to not being able to finish due to a consistent crash. (running "sntrm.exe -w" from an admin command prompt got me past the spot) for me it was mostly transitions to new areas that would crash it. Buyer beware, the game is not very stable.
I don't hand out 5 stars often but for me at least this game deserves it. Beautiful graphics, great soundtrack, solid controls and gameplay, all with a half decent story line to follow. It's a bit short but not in a bad way, it doesn't linger too long and get dull and it's short enough to occasionally just replay it without needing 100 hours of free time. There's multiple weapons and upgrades so you can choose your style and a new game + mode . all in all its a really solid little package. It's frequently on sale and you can't ask for much more bang for your buck.
Despite all the good reviews i wasn't really able to get into this game. I like strategy games to have pauses , chances for strategy, to know the units, to plan an attack. This is not that kind of game. maybe the later levels change but the first few are non-stop action and goal oriented play. basically go to spot A shoot enemies hold position b no go to spot c and kill more. every few minutes the camera is flying around and commanders are barking orders and it's onto the next objective. no reprieve, no chance to think about your troops or what to do just go-go-go and with very specific directives all the time i rarely felt that I was actually in control, just grunt following orders. Combined with the constant chaos of explosions and allied units and the similarity between the units I'm controlling everything is just a messy blur. For some this seems fresh and interesting and they will enjoy the constant action but it's just not my style of "Strategy" , for me I like something more deep.
It's OK, the first few hours are pretty fun as you sail around the Caribbean and explore but soon the game shows its true colors and overall the gameplay is pretty shallow and has a variety of problems. - the game forces you to "reset progress" periodically. your crew will eventually loose moral and you are forced to split up your loot and pay them. This causes you to loose all crew, all but a small percetage of any money you earned and all your fleet except your flagship. This is pretty annoying if you had some nice ships and a sizable crew. This also kills trade, travel can be very slow and without fighting your morale goes down faster it's not very profitable to be a trader, capturing ships is faster, easier and earns way more money. - the ballroom minigame starts out pretty tedious. but at least at the lower levels the game gives you key highlights so you just plug along based on the queues. After the first captain rank-up you loose the highlights so the game goes from boring but easy to insanely difficult. - you really don't need cannons on your ship. Naval battles can be won by either sinking the ship or capturing it. Obviously capturing gets you more loot and you often get more crew and the ship itself. But if you shoot up the ship you earn less. so very quickly you learn to never fire a shot and just dodge incoming fire until you ram the ship and start the captain battle (swordfighting). the sword fights are fast and easy, after upgrading you can usually win just mashing one key and you get goodies and a ship with 0% damage you can keep or sell. After figuring that out I pretty much never fired a shot afterwards and could capture any ship with ease. If you can get it cheap it's good for a couple hours but pans out to be very dull.
This game is very much like Hitman, you need to sneak around to achieve an objective, often by incapacitating enemies and wearing their cloths as a disguise. The controls are very similar and has that kind of feel. The game has some nice features, enemies will recognize items you carry to identify you. Example if you steal a german soldiers cloths but still have that russian rifle slung over your shoulder they will be alerted. It also treats disguises and actions a bit more liberally than Hitman. You can run, walk by and even bump into enemies that are "green" on the map (those that are "fooled by your outfit". While sometimes some enemies are always "red" (higher ranking officers etc) that will see through your current disguise. The bad part is the game is very linear. Very rarely do you feel rally free to accomplish a goal and there aren't very many choices or unique opportunities or scripted type events (like say turning off a generator or planting a bomb for a distraction). The story seems pretty weak and the voice acting and lip sync in the cunt scenes is pretty bad.
Can't vouch for the gameplay as i cannot get the game to play properly. On windows 7 I get like 3-5 FPS, seems others have had the problem but no real solution.
UrU is a weird little chapter in the Myst series. It lacks the immersion of the originals (since you have a clumsy avatar) but overall it's an OK adventure game. It does have it's moments, the environments are pretty cool and the sountrack is great. It has some environmental puzzles and light platforming type stuff which kinda suck. overall If you liked the original games the main UrU game is good for a lark, especially at sale price. I think if you weren't into Myst at all It would not be as interesting as a stand-alone game. DLC note: "To D'ni" really just has some story stuff, no true content. mostly shows off the hub area the MMO would have had. Path to the shell has what I feel is probably THE WORST puzzle I have ever encountered in an adventure game. It's abysmal. So much so I'll spoil it in this review if you wish to save some headache: SPOILER ALERT: to beat path of the shell you must.... stand in one spot for ~13 minutes. No joke. that DLC culminates in finding an egg timer on a shelf, from which you must construe a unit of time. which happens to be like 12+ minutes.. The solution to the grand puzzle is standing on a button for 12 minutes without moving.
