Having loved anything Indiana Jones related, I was looking forward to playing this game. Who wouldn't want to watch an "unaired" Indiana Jones adventure, let alone experience it first hand. But sadly, Emperor's Tomb feels more like the 1st attempt of a fledgeling studio at a 3D game. Emperor's Tomb feels so basic & on a budget, you might as well be playing Tomb Raider 1. Problem is, that game was released 6 years prior to this one, yet nothing much changed. Controls are so bad, they'd often get you killed, level design is repetitious and leaves no room for exploration, progression is linear - & if you stray from the path designated for you, the difficulty will immediately rise, & the camera is so bad, it rarely shows you what you want to look at. Combat is easy enough but repetitive, partly due to you being forced to fight hand to hand, & partly due to the enemies just standing there, waiting for you to attack them. After a while I felt like I was playing Mortal Kombat with an Indy skin. Granted, you can use a lot of things as weapons to attack the enemy, but they're as useless as can be. Hacking away at a baddie using a machete, I might as well have tickled him with a feather. Granted, you can use guns, but the aiming takes its cues from Trespasser. Meaning you flail your arm around while the camera shows you everything but the bad guy, while he keeps moving around waiting for you to pull the trigger. More often than not the bad guy would get bored & finally attack me before I landed a single shot. It doesn't help that the enemies of each section seem to only have two skins to choose from. In fact, entering one area I encountered three bad guys, all of which looked exactly the same. And the look of the levels is just as uninspired - every level you play seems just like the previous one, & the lack of checkpoints means you'll get to experience them over & over again. They're so basic, I felt like I wasn't playing an Indy game, but rather a game with Indy in it.
Army Men has always been a favorite series of mine, despite only playing one game - Army Men 2. That game and its concept hooked me so well, I was willing to play any game in the series. But as a kid, I never found another game to play. In fact, I don't remember how the hell I got ahold of Army Men 2 in the first place. So as an adult, I had to catch up. But having played Army Men 2, it's hard being happy with what is essentially a DLC package for it. In fact, having a mishmash of missions with no connection to each other whatsoever, Toys in Space seems more like a series of fan-made levels rather than the real deal. Which is a shame, since the premise to this game is very interesting. It seems aliens land on our Earth, and it's up to us to fight them. The game does continue the old boring tan army vs. green army conflict - no-one deems it wise to band together to fight a common foe, but adding aliens to the mix livens it up. The possibilities are endless, but without much of a plot, you don't get very much invested. I don't remember if Army Men 2 was very much different, but my adult mind can no longer enjoy running and gunning aimlessly. Plus, it doesn't help that the difficulty curve resembles a sine function. In your first mission you'll be given as much ammo and long-distance attacks as possible, while at the next you'll be faced by respawning enemies, land mines, air attacks and incredibly accurate infantry men. And a mission or two later, you'll be free to roam the map uninterrupted. You do get a few infantry men to aid you in your missions, but they're as useful as tying a brick to your leg. Oftentimes I'd ditch them and go out on my own. I survived longer that way. It doesn't help that their path selection seems to be "take the scenic route, and split up whenever possible". This game is simply a grind - an affair of saving every few meters of progress. And as an adult, I no longer enjoy such a game.
Being a big fan of detective fiction, I'll read almost anything & play almost anything related to the genre. It's a guilty pleasure I enjoy indulging in from time to time, & it's even better when it's presented as a point & click game - another genre I enjoy. So looking forward to solving an interesting murder mystery, I was disappointed when all I got was a point & click game that's so on rails, it plays itself. You're constantly told what to do, & when you're making a mistake the game tells you so, & any advancement in the investigation is garnered via a series of mini-games. Meaning that making the wrong deductions is impossible, & making the right ones is simply a matter of trial & error. In fact, I got 40% into the game by completely ignoring the plot & skipping the dialogue, & focusing solely on the mini-games. It doesn't help that the detective work in this game is laughable. Throughout the game Poirot will make observations about the people around him, & you'll have to prove those deductions in yet another mini-game. One such deduction is that someone is a heavy smoker, & the clues to that deduction is that she has a cigarette in her hand, & next to her are matches & an ashtray. Another deduction is that someone lives a simple life, by observing he has a plain-looking tap. It doesn't help that the voice-work in this game is simply god awful, bordering on parody. It's either over the top or emotionless, & the actors seem to be recording their lines independent from each other, leading to some weird responses to questions asked. Add to that the weird occasional bugs, & a loose interpretation of what you're clicking on, leading my character at times to go in the complete opposite direction of where I wanted it to go. Also some dialogue you can skip, while some you can't, & at times I seemed to be able to make my character's agonizingly slow walk quicker, & at times I couldn't. Leading to a half-baked game with an interesting plot hiding somewhere in there.
The problem with a point & click game, is the problem with all point & click games. Meaning they're either too easy or too hard, the plot is usually flimsy, & the experience is secondary to the plot, considering it changes from player to player. This game is on the easy side-easy enough to be more of an interactive movie than a game, with the main character constantly telling you what you ought to do next, in case you didn't figure it out yourself. So often times you'll find yourself waiting for the game to allow you to do the things you know you're supposed to do next. The plot IS interesting, & deals with a convinct looking at hard time & trying to escape, while his woman is on the other side trying to prove his innocence. But the plot soon becomes stale, since you spend most of the game with one of the characters, rather than switching between them as advertised. It doesn't help that all your choices are set in stone-you're going through a path someone set for you, rather than be at the helm. Which wouldn't make this too bad a game, if it didn't try to forcefully turn itself into a game for adults. It might have the apperance of a kids' game, or an age-neutral game, but sex is inserted into this game in an extremely over the top & superflous way. We're told the two main characters' relationship is basically a sex marathon, that the convict's best friend is basically Quagmire, constantly trying to convince the convict's better half to cheat on him, that apparantly the local park is rife with sailors hiding in bushes doing the business, etc, etc. Trying to be edgy in that childish "wink wink nudge nudge" sort of way, to prove to us, the players, that this is game is so on the edge, it's practically X-Treme. Its edgyness adds nothing, but does remove the focus from the paper-thin plot & uninteresting characters, & the beta-game feeling. Resolution is poor, animation is jarring, dubbing is lifeless, subtitles don't match audio & audio is poorly recorded at times.
