I am soooooooooo excited. This is the very best Heroes has to offer. These were the absolute the games ever did at story telling, and they combine elements from all the games giving a more cohesive storyline to the series. The games start way too easy, which was a turn off for fans when they first came out, but the later chapters get back to form. The game leads right into Heroes IV and the barbarian campaign from that is really just the last chapter of this :-) I suggest finding out the order all the Heroes games take place in. And playing the campaigns from them, this, and Might and Magic all where they go.
The best part about this game is the atmosphere. It really feels like you're walking around New Orleans and New Orleans is such a unique city. Compare this game to Broken Sword where you spend the first part of it walking around Paris (which is also a unique city) and yet Broken Sword's environment could have been anywhere. Peppered throughout are historical tidbits, which actually are interesting and come in just the right amounts. That's the best part of the game. Also quite fun is the feeling at the beginning that you're just sort of puttering about and maybe not taking your investigation too seriously -- that's a nice change of pace. You start off maybe going to find your friend with the police who wants you to meet him at the crime (but he hasn't told you where it was), or else you could go pay your grandmother a visit. Or maybe you just want to visit the park or look around a Voodoo museum. Eventually, however, all you want to do is to investigate the case. But your grandfather's mystery and trying to bed that woman in the limousine will still pop from time-to-time. That dialogue is also good generally, and educational, and spoken by some very fine actors (including a Tim Curry who has use to the game to stretch his talent quite a bit). And the art is top notch. Perhaps the music is not to memorable. Atmosphere is what all that amounts to and the game is exceptional with it, enough that it gets four out of five stars for just that, since there isn't too much else in the game. The plot unoriginal, being borrowed from She by H. Rider Haggard, and the "She" in this game is the least interesting character of the bunch and has about three lines of dialogue for the whole game and yet we SHOULD care about her the most after the hero (the game is guilty of a common movie foible that we should care about the female protagonist because she sleeps with the hero). Other issues include there not being a single puzzle that is taxing or memorable, that there are glitches a plenty (the most annoying that the music is too loud and has to be adjusted every time you load the game), and that every so often, even regularly in the first few chapters, you have no idea what to do next and must revisit every single location and when you find something to do you must then do it all over again to see if now anything's changed in any of the locations you've already visited. (I admit this the lazy quality I spoke highly of before is partly to blame for this. But give us some more of those errands to run about town so that we can feel that there's SOME reason to visit the drug a fifth time. Or else open up a few NEW locations -- there are just the old ones over and over game for the whole game with a vacation every now and then) A final complaint has to do with ending, but there won't be any spoilers because it has to with so many adventure games, probably 90% of the games I've played. The climax rushes in with what amounts to a movie punctuated by pauses where you must do something, and it must be the correct or you die and must start from your last save (hopefully right before the movie), these "puzzles" are never ingenious, it's just some obvious thing your hero must do, or maybe it's one of two or three obvious things and the other two kill you. It is so obnoxious because it's not really a game, it just forces you to watch the movie sequence three to five times and cross your fingers. It's the opposite of exciting which is what I'd hope the end of a story would bring. It's hardly something to blame Gabriel Knight for since it across the board on adventure games, but somebody needs to rethink this, and until then just give us a straight movie. Anyways perhaps I've spent more time on the problems that what is great about it. But it's hard to explain what is great when that is feeling brought on by the atmosphere. I heartily recommend it. And hope that the sequels will be just as good. :-)
I really like adventure games and kinda felt like I had missed something, by not buying this when it came out. After all people had been giving 5 star reviews. It does NOT deserve them. For starters, the main character is annoying as all get out. She is given all this obnoxious cliche-ridden dialogue that we are supposed to find ironic smile at but it just makes me want to gag her. I prefer logical mechanical-type puzzles, Myst-type code breaking, riddles, and in modern games, physical puzzles to pixel hunting and inventory puzzles. Here the "puzzles", are pretty much exclusively of the latter two types and particularly objectionable because while the plot is serious the actual solutions make far less sense in the real world than even the puzzles of a Discworld game -- which at least had puns to fall back on to explain them. And finally the plot is delivered through exceptionally verbose dialogue trees that seem unending in their delivery of pointless and repetitive information. I'm sure the journey would be much shorter if not for all the detours and flat tires, but as it was I turned for home before the end of it. Go play GOG's three free RPG's instead. Beneath a Steel Sky, Lure of the Temptress, are both solid four star adventures (BSS maybe even a five I'd have to play it again to be sure). And Dragonsphere while rather too easy is worth playing for the well integrated plot.
I think two might be a bit harsh. The game was entertaining, but it was below average and three is average so I guess that gives me two. Crusaders is a very short action game that has little to do with the Might and Magic series proper. It does have two sequels, Warriors and Shifters (the last of which sounds like it was probably the best of the trilogy from reviews, but it was only for Playstation 2 so I missed it, maybe GOG will put up a port?) It lacks any RPG elements which is disappointing, but as a Hexen-style first person slicer, it's perfectly average. You run up to things and chop them with your sword, sometimes you stand back and magic them. See some pretty environments (for the time). And eventually the game ends. It is enjoyable, but there are better ways to spend your time.
Dragonsphere has a great plot, pleasant graphic, and a few fun puzzles. It also has a few moments so terrible as to drag it back down to mediocre. An example of this is that throughout the game there are torches on almost every wall. In the beginning like any good kleptomaniac you try to take a few of these torches but are told you cannot. However, there is ONE torch you have to take so that you can see in a dark room..... But of course why should you try? You've never been able to take a torch before. The game could have even just said, "You do not need a torch yet." Or just let you have any of them. And there are more things like this throughout the game. The logic problem in the faerie maze, for instance being annoyingly complicated by having the faerie indistinguishable and moving about and sometimes even moving out of sight. Or the teleportation door puzzle that is on the level of something out of a disc world game. I feel like all my problems could have been prevented so easily, but as it is the puzzles that are hard are hard for the wrong reasons, and so as a game it rather fails. It is a rather good story however -- at least for the first half. Then everything is revealed and there's a promise that the second half will be even better, but instead corners seemed to be cut, you don't really see anything new except of the spirit world, and you have the same mini-game again against the sultan. But it is head and shoulders over -- say King's Quest. The art style is great and I love seeing the rotoscoping of the characters' movements. I also quite liked how interesting the many red herring items were, but at the same time I would have liked them more had I been able to use them in that too straight-forward second half of the game. It's certainly worth playing, but I wouldn't be too afraid of going to a walkthrough, if I were you. I think I might have bumped this up to four stars had I known that this time I could take the torch. (Also a walkthrough will provide you with answers to some copy protection questions which Gog did supply me with but it was in a text document called "answers" which made me think it was a walkthrough, and I hadn't allowed myself to resort to looking at one at the point at which I needed the answers.)
