There are many good things to say about this game. From the technical standpoint, it‘s very well made, the graphics are fine, there are almost no bugs and everything works as it should. That‘s quite a lot for a modern game. Still, I was angry at this game most of the time while playing it. It‘s trying to copy Myst and could have been better if not for that premise First, there‘s the music. Myst-like, but amounting to a horrible, monotonous plinking all the time, everywhere. Then there‘s the story. It‘s a very good idea in general, but told in a way that makes it boring beyond belief. The worst part is when the game stops in the middle for a ten minute story monologue presented by glowing blob with a power point presentation. And in the end you don‘t even get to see what happens at all. It also takes the puzzle island idea from Myst – but you never leave that island. Besides some rusty tunnels and a brief underwater section you are always in the same environment. Well made, but boring after some time. There are a few good puzzles in this game. I just got the feeling that they are almost all at the beginning and then decline in quality. After three quaters it starts throwing pipe puzzles at you and requires you to play a game of Mastermind, while you walk in a tunnle from puzzle to puzzle. It would have done the game good to cut out most of the weaker riddles for some exploration. Most of them are way to tedious, too. Many require an ungodly amount of running around just to check what you are doing. Some aren‘t even riddles, but just list of easy to mess up chores. Many others are repeated in different difficulties. Others require tasks to be repeated several times after you have allready found out what to do. It seems like the developers had a serious case of horror vacui with their puzzles. They were afraid to leave any kind of puzzle type short of crosswords out, tried to bind the player as long as possible – and cluttered a decent game.
Moving to 3D was absolutely necessary for the series in 2005, after the failed experiments with the interface in the last two games. And whatever people might say today, it was absolutely cool at the time. The graphics were great and still keep up. Most of the time. They take a serious dive in the fourth age, probably due to time constraints in development. However, most of the experiment was a success: The environments work, movement is smooth and, even if people claim the opposite, there are very few bugs: You can skip parts of the game by doodeling on the plate, but you're not supposed to do that. The symbols you can draw on it are always clearly labeled. Sometimes the slate disappears but can be brought back by opening the main menu. I fell through the floor in a clipping issue once, but could walk back out. That was all! That's really good for a game of 2005 and I played the old retail version. Also, the music is way better than in Myst IV. A breath of fresh air, really. Much more controversial than the graphics I find the puzzle choices. It was not such a good idea to base them all around a central mechanic. This makes them rather easy as you always have a clear goal and the developers had to throw elements in to obfuscate the player with useless information and devices. Still, this is the easiest game of the series after Myst. You will get stuck, but the solution is always: You're thinking to complicated, take the easiest solution possible. The worst part of the game is the story and atmosphere, I'm afraid. It starts out with this great, bleak air of doom and dispair but is unable to build up on it. You much fewer journals than in all the other games and all are only written by Yeesha, making it hard to get an interesting view of the background. I especially disliked the ending, it's just not worthy of being the final act of this epic storyline. It comes out of the blue and is just too happy.
This game lives and breathers System Shock 2, it even has some more or less hidden references (i.e. Looking Glass, the lift being stuck in the aboretum), so I think it's a crime that the publisher changed the title.In many ways, Prey is a bit too close to SS2 for my tastes. It seems like the developers wanted it to feel the same and neglected their own ideas over it. However, it's not SS2. It starts out as bleak, but the atmosphere loosens up quite a bit halfway through. The game mechanics are well thought through. It matters a lot, what abilities you learn. Upgrading you jumping ability and using jetpack upgrades makes you able to glide through the levels to the point you can almost fly. Investing learning alien abilities can make everything much more tedious because security turrets start attacking you. There is a lot of room of different playstyles. An equal amount of thought was put into the equipment. Weapons that seem useless show their true potential when upgraded, while the more conventional arms can be severly lacking in the late game. Granades can be used in creative ways. All this can impact the difficulty of your playthrough. I found this a bit problematic, because it's easy to find exploits and render a challenging game too easy. The environments are fairly big, varied and stylish. The pseudo open world design, though, is the biggest flaw of the game in my opinion: Quest markers often lead you astray and in the late game you get overwhelmed with fetch quest after fetch quest. Traversing the ship quickly is the weakest point of the game, as it means you may have four or five load screens after another. The hectic late game with lackluster enemies combined with weak endings ruined the game a bit for me. It's absolutely great in the beginning to the middle, but feels severly rushed at its closure. But the overal experience is defenitely worth 4 out of 5 stars.
Usually, I don't review a game after just four hours of gametime, but the average time of all players is 4h46min, so I think I have a good impression of it. There's a good game in there somewhere, because the elements are there. The graphics are stylized but beautiful, the fighting system works fine and many of the mechanics are well integrated. You run around, kill monsters, solve simple puzzles with levers and blocks, like in many other games. So what is missing? First, I found the equipment system lacking. You can improve your life, stamina and sword, as well as upgrade your combos and minor fighting techniques. While there are no numbers in the game, you are basicly just raising your stats. No new weapons, no armor, no special abilities. I did not notice any difference with many of the upgrades. So collecting and exploration is not the meat of the game. Then there's the lack of story. The creators call it a "wordless narrative", but to be frank, it's just no narrative to speak of. It's the typical video game plot: Some kind of evil plague is spreading, here's a sword, go save the world. You don't know what your character's motivation is and that takes a lot of my motivation away. You don't know what you are doing, you are just pushing buttons and killing monsters to see what happens next. There's also the problem that the overworld is nicely created and colorful, but you are going to go into a lot of dungeons. Those are always few drab tiles over a grey abyss without much decoration. Think of Hob like one of the older 2D Zelda games without the ability to find equipment and without the story. You can't play it as an immersive adventure and you can't play it as dumb-fun video game.
I bought this game on screenshots alone. When I went into it for the first time, I was disappointed: It was clunky, buggy and hard in an unpleasant way. All these things are true. However I reinstalled it and followed the advice to turn the combat difficulty way down. Amazingly, the game was still not easy. I managed to beat it without dying, because death sucks so much in PAMELA - but that was rather challenging. I just took no risks. Considering it, that‘s probably the way that a survival game should be played. I found a lot of enjoyment in exploring the magnificient futuristic city. While the graphics are certainly not top quality the design is. The layout of everything seems to make sense more in real life than in a game. I wouldn‘t be suprised if the designers planned the city first and built the game around it. That would also explain the lazily blocked off passages. The story is nothing to write home about, but I came to like the way it its told by the AI. I first thought the voice acting is bad, but after listening to her for a while I rather think she‘s doing very well. The way she conveys emotions without emotion in her voice is very fitting. It‘s a sentinet computer program with no real way to express the emotions it is programmed with. Combat is clunky and difficult, but that makes the upgrade and leveling system really shine. There are only a few weapons, armor types and shields, but everything can be upgraded. If you don‘t want to spend an eternity in the game, you‘ll have to concentrate on one set of equipment. Base building is basic, and never really explained. My recommendation is not to use the security features offered. If you need them, you built in the wrong place. All in all, I really fell in love with the game. The mysterious, dark atmosphere in contrast with the light and creative world drew me in. That the game flawed made it somehow even better. It felt nostalgic, like mastering an old and difficult to play title.
It's pretty clear that only the style of this game mattered during development. Gameplay and plot were just afterthoughts and that shows. The gameplay is sluggish, bland and without any challenge. The "story" is your basic video game nonsense. Well, that might not have mattered that much if the art was any good. It isn't. It's kitsch. It's the video game equivalent of a wall tattoo. It looks like decor paintings you can buy at IKEA. To be more precise: It's obviously inspired by "French" decor paintings that have been inspired by haute couture sketches, paired with a bit of minimalist greeting card design. It's made to be appealing, not to be artistic. And that is basicly what every video game tries to do, but usually isn't so pretentious about.
This game seemed amazing in the first two hours or so. It built a great atmosphere and managed to visualize the mental problems of the protagonist in a way, that made me really feel it. It also features a solid fighting system and a small amount of impressive looking enemies. But, that's it. That's all! The largest amount of gameplay time is take up by puzzles that don't deserve to be called that name. You walk around very, very slowly looking at things until you find the right spot to look at things. Then you can go on to do exactly the same over and over again. There's no problem solving or even thinking involved. When you have to fight, it's always in a seperate arena and generally goes on for so long that you are fed up before half of it is over. It's not very difficult, but very tiring. What little, weak story there is, is only told through disembodied voices, making it even more forgettable. It can all be summed up like this: There's about forty-five minutes of great content that is repeated over and over again. Sadly none of this content is very much fun done more than once.
A kind of repetetive and bare bones game, especially in the beginning. While the scenerey is nice, many assets are repeated over and over again. There are only four types of enemies and effetivly only four different weapons - of which one is your default. You task is to find data and signal fragments, collect scrap and take bunkers form enemy forces. You seem to play some kind of AI and can transfer yourself to a random robot chassis at checkpoints after you die or as a method of fast traveling. At first, that's kind of easy and you repeat your same tactics over and over again. Then, after about two thirds of the map are conquered, it suddenly gets all tough. Suddenly you can't go in solo, guns blazing, anymore. You have to use a recruitment tool, which takes one of your two weapon slots and take fellow robots along. As much in the game squad management is extremely basic. I haven't even found a command to kick a robot from your squad and the only command, rallying at a selected point, usually doesn't work. While the AI of your allies is braindead, they work as extra fire power and usually do the job. Except if there is a turrent, then they get killed every single time. So the best tactics is to go in solo, destroy all turrents, go back to base and come back with a squad. Tedious, but effective. Still, I think combat is pretty fun in this game. You have to manage raising and lowering your shield and your AOE, while trying not to get surrounded and looking for cover to recharge constantly. The guns feel nie and sound great, especially over long distances. The exploration aspect is kind of so-so. While most objects you discover all look the same and just give you a piece of story you can read through (no voiceovers), there are one or two small highlights among them. The music could be more present, in my opinion, it's generally hardly noticeable. To sum it up: Very basic game with not much variety but interesting, tactical combat and a nice feel and atmosphere.
I did not care much vor the story in Myst III as it seemed to be a weird spin-off and the antagonist was silly. Here, the story is fine, it's even good, well presented and in line with Atrus broken family affairs from Myst and Riven. I liked the ending especially, it made up for many things I hated in the game. However, many of the puzzles are really, really bad. Many of them are hard for all the wrong reasons, like imprecise controls (including a bug that made my cursor jump around every so often, making the first Dream almost unsolvable) and bad visuals - for example pink and violet are apparently the same colour in the world of Myst IV. There are also timed puzzles that are infuriating to solve even when you know exactly what to do and way to many riddles that feel like cheap minigames. I also think that the graphics in general are not up to the other games. Ok, Myst I has aged badly, but Riven and even Myst III have not. Here however, most of the environments are bland and boring, with Tohmana being the only exeption - and that was allready partly established in Myst III. It's also by far the slowest Myst game to play. Even on a modern PC the screens take more than two seconds to change and the imprecise and laggy animations of the hand cursor can drive you insane. I also hated the music in Serenia since it was too prominent, too loud, and I had to mute it. The rest, with the exeption of that Peter Gabriel song, is fine, as always. Well, what is there to say. It's somewhat on par to Myst III, though it makes completely different mistakes.
This is, in my opinion, the best of the first three Myst games. I haven't played the other ones yet. The graphics aged very well and are still quite beautiful. You can take your time and take in all of the landscape, but it's also possible to get very quickly from point A to B as puzzles often need you to do. To be frank, the world(s) are quite small, but the attention that was put in every detail is astonishing. The puzzles can be very hard. They require a lot of out of the box thinking and are often presented to you in a manner, that you might try to solve one, where you don't have the nescessary clues yet. Since you can't know that, that can lead to frustration. On the other hand, they are very rewarding if solved. I especially like that you have to collect clues from all over the islands and that some puzzles are linked to each other. Myst was much more straight forward, which has bad and good sides. The story is the best part. As in Myst, it required some reading, but not as much, since more of the plot is happening at the moment, around you. The antagonist is sympathetic and I felt with him.
