I completely forgot about this title after all these years. I think I finished it around year 2000. This was the time when Core's Tomb Raider success was about to collapse with Angel of Darkness. Although it made Core to sink, Eidos still sold more than 2,5 million copies. Lucasarts was the master of 2D (and 2,5D in case of Grim Fandango) adventure games genre, hope everybody had a chance to experience this but they coldn't come close to such number. The problem they had was that they were not trying to compete in field of technology. I guess nobody buying game from Lucasarts expected it to have innovative engine (although DarkForces did have it in its time) because the strongest element they had to offer was always story telling. It's like people who gathered around George Lucas in LucasArts somehow secretly understood what was making the original Star Wars saga truly great and were trying to express it in games they made. However the market for adventure games was shrinking, everyone was looking for modern 3D games. Infernal Machine probably was an attempt to do a game that will sell but technically they were not ready - Sith engine was not modern enough. Still in my opinion story telling and level design in Infernal Machine are on very high level - you can "feel the force". To cut things short: Negatives (known and obvious): - controls are pretty clunky - graphics is dated - some bugs Positives: + fun level design (this game puts much more emphasis on adventure aspect then platform in opposite to Tomb Raider for example) + sound effects and music in form on occasional "jingles" (Clint Bajakian's fine work) + Indiana Jones's adventure aura you can definitely feel it - thanks goes to Hal Barwood who also created IJ and Fate of Atlantis and all level designers My favorite levels (random order): * Tian Shan River * Shambala Sanctuary * Palawan Lagoon * Palawan Temple * Olmec Valley * Meroë * King Sol's Mines Man, these spiders are still scary :)
