One of the worse clones of Sid Mayer's Pirates. Cumbersome controls, unfriendly saving mechanism, uneven difficulty, no tutorial... The best thing I can say about it is, it works and if you want to be reminded of how much the world has changed since then, often for the better, it's one of the best examples. It wasn't world changing back then and today I wouldn't even call it good. I would recommend buying only to the fans of this particular game, certainly not the genre as a whole. Then again, I counted myself amongst both before playing it again after all those years. Not that I regret buying it... Just a word of warning, I guess.
I trusted the authors to have created a good game no matter the reviews. I was wrong. The nicest thing I can say about this is a botched updated Hexplore. Everything is wrong here: writing, RPG elements,... No, that's not right. The game is stable and the graphics are okay. Still, that is a norm nowadays, so no stars for that. Horrible game and a waste of money and time.
The game is horrible, I never played it at the time of creation so I have no attachment to it whatsoever; the controls are insanely bad, the game is so fast and illogical that you only watch out for which button to press instead of the animations, so even that is not there for enjoyment. It's just plain bad, I feel angry for the decision to pay for it, especially the amount gog asks. AAArghhdamnit.
I redeemed it through giveaway and thought it may be problematic but didn't even begin to imagine. The game/tutorial starts with building an execution facility. For f* sake. One thing is a prison architect, another is doing this. Civilised countries don't murder people. Yes, US, I'm looking at you. And I don't think that the authors wanted to teach anybody a moral lesson. I just think they wanted us to enjoy ourselves. Look at the amount of dlc. If they wanted to teach you about problematic morality of the current penal systems, they would start soft and then make you understand once you think you built something "good". But no, they start with this and they even give a backstory for the prisoner to be executed so that you feel good about sending him there and tell you it's not your choice anyway because he has been found guilty. But you do it. Well, if you want to feel sick, your choice. I was trying to play it for as long as I could but that was it. About 5 minutes in and I feel like it was already too late.
gog sells a game incompatible with modern OSs. Let's face it, we buy games here for convenience, the studios are usually long gone and get no money from the transaction, so what we pay for is the fact that gog makes the games work for us. Once again, they didn't.
There is just everything wrong with this game. Stability, voice acting, music, soul patch, sound effects, dialogues, monologues, writing in general, puzzles, soul patch, character design, pacing, soul patch. Just everything. Ever thought what would happen if soul patch was a game? Me neither. And I used to sport one. I also thought I was being funny. Hell, I must have been annoying.
One of the best adventure games and a worthy successor to the original two. Comparing it to others in the series: Best story. Just barely okay humour (but still great in general). Average to good dialogues. Mostly great pacing. A little more of going back and forth through empty places at times, tough. Length okay. Controls are okay but I still prefer point and click. Graphics good, art style okay-ish, I don't like some of the decisions but can live with them and is in line with redesign of the first two games. Character design solid but not as good as in the first three. Not enough Murray. I like the scene design. I very much appreciate the fact the creators did not take too many liberties in changes to the franchise. The music is okay, sound effects okay. I was never a huge fan of the voice acting in MI, playing the original games without it and having a certain idea of how everyone should sound but it grew on me and works well here, it seems like it complements the rest best in the series. Being a traditionalist, I save like a maniac, but I did not detect any glitches that would cause me to load alternative saves. I actually liked the episodic format very much but can understand why during the game's original release people hated it. Puzzles are often more obvious than in any of the games before which may work against the trademark humour but saves you a lot of frustration. Generally speaking, not the most memorable game but certainly a very good one and after the Escape a great return to form. Shame the creators will not get another attempt at making a classic.
I was searching for some funny, even if average, adventure game to lift up my spirits. Reading description of the series and seeing the ratings I decided to give this a try. It made my depression worse. Programming-wise, it seems okay even though there are some technical peculiarities like the absence of volume settings (so you cannot turn music volume down/up, only on/off). I actually quite like the graphic style. The music is not bad but doesn't feel connected to the style of the rest and is openly derivative. I did not detect any humour, probably a cultural thing. Voice acting is uninspired but not outright annoying like in e.g. Broken Sword, which is a classic despite that. Story is just uninteresting. Puzzles are easy save for the damned pixel hunting combined with horrible cursor behavior, puzzles are more about pixel hunting than thinking about what you should use and where. The dialogues, sorry, monologues, look like a bad translation from Spanish combined with cliche lines from old movies and some street lingo the writer decided to put in just to impress us with his English. In dialogues, you don't really have a choice in what the character says, you just click on every option until there are no more left. The screenplay is just bad, the character motivations may be logical but how they are explained is not. I felt like I was being force-fed endless cutscenes that the authors created to eliminate at least some of the non-sequitur that resulted from often arbitrary change of scenes. If someone asks me a week from now if I played it, I will not remember. I am absolutely sure of that. It's not even bad enough to be memorable and I bought for the price of two beers (beer is cheap here). I already forgot the title. Whatever.
This is an atrocity. It feels like a completely different game. And a bad one. The story has been changed, scenes added and removed, the voice acting is -censored-, not helping is the absence of sound engineering with dialogues mixed from different recordings oh so obviously; even the music sounds horrible for some reason. The reworked art reminds me of those prefabs everyone added to adverts in the era of Clippy. Even the intro, oh, the intro. And let's not even start with the technical aspects of the game, like "fullscreen" being devoid of any resolution settings, simply being a maximized borderless window with a horrible, blurry, upscale from the original 640x480. FFmpeg has better upscaling and it's real-time (which, honestly, this probably is, too, it would explain why it's so bad). Obviously nobody bothered to retouch the art, they simply added more where needed so new scenes have background that is sharp while the original sprites are upscaled and seem like they actually have some jpeg artifacts in "fullscreen", in scenes where they added some comparatively high-res videos in corners of the screen, at least three layers of incompatible pictures, resolution-wise, are clearly visible. You can actually get the original if you download it separately by going to goodies/extras section - for some reason, it's not included in the game download. I suggest those who want to find out why so many people loved Broken Sword to ignore the main content and only focus on the extras. 1 star for DC, +1 star for GOG's "packaging" (inclusion of the original).
When the game came out years ago, I bought it, played it, threw it away. Literally, that's how much I hated what they did to the franchise. Now, after a very long time, I thought I would give it another chance. But GOG won't let me. There are tutorials how to make it run ok on Windows 10, which is now the dominant system but having to do it by downloading some external stuff somewhere is just not what I expect when I buy an old software created by a defunct company from a current distributor. Both the game and GOG's service in this case are horrible. For potential buyers: no internal or external settings will make it run smoothly on any Windows 10 computer. The problem is bad design, not your computer. There exist two wrappers but the distributor did not get either of them.
