The premise of this game drew me in. You are a lone gunman, trapped in a malaria-stricken African nation. Having fallen victim to the disease yourself, you need to get some weapons and money the only way you know how: being a badass mercenary. On the hardest setting, the AI does realistic bullet damage to you on pretty much a 1:1 ratio with your damage to them. This adds to the feel of realism, as well as a realistic sense of making you crap your pants when bullets start flying your way, and leads to some jubilation when you take out an enemy squad. However, the game is marred by several problems. Stealth This game would've been made a lot more fun by incorporating a viable stealth system, especially because there are realistic day/night cycles. Instead, getting near any enemy will let them know exactly where you are, and they instantly, automatically alert their buddies, resulting in a huge amount of aforementioned extremely deadly bullets your way. The Story/Why there be so many enemies? Another thing that ticked me off when playing this was the fact that pretty much everyone in the game world is hostile to you. Because the damage is realistic, that is annoying. What the game SHOULD have done is let you pick a side in the conflict between the rebels and then force you to stick with the choice, making one side of the rebel army your friend. The game could even have incorporated random events that incorporated fighting in the countryside or at bases between the two groups. Instead, the AI is friendly with each other, and all of them are out to kill you, no matter who you're working for. The game attempts to explain this away, but for me this kills a lot of the game's realism (after all, the nation is in a civil war, but it seems everybody is only ever fighting you! Is it a civil war against you?) Repetition The game's story doesn't introduce enough new elements. Yeah, it has a new environment you eventually travel to, but once you're there it's the same old business. What they failed to do was add some color to the storyline. The environment has plenty to do, and looks great; if only there was a system of main quests that involved more than "kill everyone at point A, go to point B, kill everyone at point B" By halfway through the game, you'll get bored. While this game is not a waste of a time, the repetition makes it almost unfinishable. There are only a couple story missions that actually break the mold.
I was intrigued by the idea of this game, after reading the gushing review at adventuregamers and playing the amazing Gabriel Knight 1 for the first time a month ago. I should've read a few of the reviews before wasting money, and more importantly time on this suckfest. I really do not understand any of the positive feedback on this one. After the masterpiece of an adventure game that Sins of the Fathers was, there is nothing good about this game. Here are a few of the more important flaws. Acting Not only is the voice acting pretty bad, especially compared to the MASTERFUL voice acting of GK1, but the full FMV style also forces the second-rate actors to fully act, which greatly compounds the problem. When (whatever's-his-actor's-name) Gabriel Knight version 2 opened the door to his castle, my heart sunk watching his annoyingly smug face. But it got worse from there. This game completely gutted the character that I loved dearly from GK1. This game made him from an intelligent, sly, charming, funny, and laughably pervy Southern guy who gets into trouble and then out again, sometimes by accident, into a bland, bland, bland, bland, bland American guy who acts like your average American tourist in a foreign country and has absolutely no redeeming qualities. If I were these Germans suffering from the ravages of the supernatural, he would be the last person I would turn to. What makes GK2's Gabriel's horrifically ugly butchery of the German language that much more stupid is GK1 Gabriel's almost perfect pronunciation of German despite not having lived there!!! What, am I supposed to believe that constant exposure to the language made him WORSE? The actress who plays Grace is almost as bad, and right there you have the two main characters. FMV's worst problem isn't its goofy style that makes it feel more like a game/movie Frankenstein, it's that the pool of voice actors is extremely limited by the fact these people also had to look and act the part. None of the insanely talented voice actors from GK1 looked the part, but they also literally blew me away. So they got replaced in this one. If it ain't broke, why oh why did they have to fix it?? On the other hand, the actress that played Gabriel's housekeeper is extremely attractive. But if that is the sole reason they had for making the entire game FMV, because they wanted to show off a hot blonde, there is something seriously wrong with the developers of this (but we knew that). Interface GK1's interface was really, really, really bad. Somehow they found a way to make it a lot worse. I think the sheer magnitude of that achievement is what earns this game a star. Oh wait, no, that was the lowest I could rate it. Oh, and no captions in this game despite almost everyone in the game speaking in a heavy German accent with early 90s-era video game sound quality? Ugh. My late night adventure game sessions of blasting the audio of poorly-written German-accented lines confused my roommates, no doubt. Story Most predictable story ever, in any medium. Puzzles You know what. . . Everything Don't buy this. Don't go anywhere near it. Play GK1 if you haven't already. I hope GK3 sucks, because after this, not even the return of Tim Curry would be enough to make me go anywhere near another game like this.
