"Innovative" is used in the description of this game, which may be a little bit of an exaggeration. That being said, it is a very unique, very cool game with absolutely top-notch aesthetics. The gameplay is fun and well-realized, if somewhat one-note. Combat is a weakness, though in spurts it can be very entertaining; the problem becomes more of a puzzle-solving exercise on how to isolate and eliminate enemies while exposing yourself for minimal damage. In general, the whole game kind of feels like a puzzle. As I said, the game is short; the time trials have a very "tacked on" feeling, just being snippets of the main game, and unfortunately the unique, artistic, minimalist DLC maps that were on consoles never released on PC to my knowledge, so you can't get them. In my mind, that's points off, as they offered some very good challenges. I also would like to point out the TERRIBLE animated cutscenes that look like the old e-surance commercials. They completely go against the bold, colorful style the rest of the game has, with a generally more muted palette, and they are poorly animated and clearly (in my mind) were the result of lack of time/money to do proper cutscenes. Indeed, the entire rest of the game is in first-person perspective, like Half-Life 1/2, and the incredibly bad cutscenes only make me wish for how cool some of those scenes would have looked with in-game graphics. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoy playing this game every couple years and have beaten it maybe 8 or 10 times just for the sheer joy it brings. Not everyone's idea of a great game, but certainly worth checking out if the idea intrigues you. PS: Avoid the sequel like the plague. It is one of the only games I've ever gotten a refund on.
Short review: this game is terrible. Long reveiw: see below. I didn't buy this on GOG and have no intention of doing so, but I played it on the PS2. Nothing I read about the game made me think it was good, and I had played Omikron: The Nomad Sould previously, so I kinda knew what to expect. It was played with friends around, so we could laugh and make fun of it MST3k-style. For anyone else who wants to do this, or who is actually thinking of enjoying this, I won't spoil the plot or reveal any of the ludicrous events along the way. On to the game. I had heard that it was the last 1/3 that ruined it for most people; for me, everything after the first hour or so was absolutely laughable. The game begins with Lucas Kane, the main character (and he IS the main character; the others you get to control have very little real impact on the plot, so all this talk of "innovative" gameplay where you play as everyone involved is just a lie) coming to in a bathroom. He has just watched himself murder a complete stranger in trance-like state. Here, the game is interesting. There are a lot of options, lots of things you can do in order to get out of this situation--or get caught standing over a dead man. Unfortunately, this is one of the game's main flaws. Though there are many paths through dialogue trees--I'll talk more about those later--and you can interact with the environment in various ways, nothing has ANYTHING to do with the ending of the game until the last couple hours or so. All of your other reactions, failures, successes, choices--none of it matters. It's a very slightly different path to one of three outcomes. Anyway, after that initial, somewhat-interesting set-up, the game falls prey to a bunch of generic twists and melodrama. A lot of vaguely-explained (or completely UNexplained) things occur, and then it's over. I managed to piece together a large part of the story before the endgame, and not in that cool, "I solved the mystery!" sort of way; I'm talking about making wild guesses based on almost no evidence--except having seen the same tired plots used over and over again in other games/movies/books. In addition to the bad story, the game has some pretty bad voicework. It isn't all cringeworthy, but none of it is very good at all. In a game that tries to be a movie, this is a very bad thing. On top of that, the writing is pretty bland, too. No one in the game manages to be an interesting take on a stereotypical character (you have the normal-guy-in-an-extraodinary-situation, the empowered female cop, the black cop, etc.) and nobody even has any really good lines. The last bit of presentation in a game is graphics, and here it's actually not too bad. The graphics aren't stellar and haven't aged very well, but they also aren't terrible; the game is old, I can't really fault it for that. What I CAN fault it for is some pretty poor animations, despite the use of mo-cap for some characters. A lot of the action scenes have really bizarre, stiff movements for the characters, and it totally kills any impact they might've had. The last bit I'm going to talk about is the gameplay, and I'm really using that term loosely. Most of the game is spent in QTEs, which naturally means you don't have anywhere near the freedom that most games offer. Okay, I can deal with QTEs, but they're BAD. Somehow, they've messed up what is really a very simple thing. The overlay for the Simon Says-style directional presses are right over the action so you can barely pay attention to what's going on with your character. Then you have the "mash the buttons!" one; this was slightly confusing at first, because there is also a bar in the middle. This implied to me that you had to mash the buttons fast enough to fill the bar, but that isn't always the case; sometimes you do, and sometimes you need to time the button presses with the lights on the sides and simply wait it out. The ones where you need to keep the marker in the middle aren't bad, though at times they are wildly sensitive. In terms of actually moving around the environment, your characters moves somewhat sluggishly and the cameras jump in perspective from scene to scene, making movement between them somewhat annoying. To add to this, running makes you control like bald tires on an oil-slick, and then you have the rather poor "immersive" way of moving the analog stick (or mouse, I suppose, on the PC) to open doors and pick things up. In theory this isn't a terrible idea, though there's no reason it couldn't be bound to a button. In practice, however, it is pioneeringly bad, and if you don't move the stick (mouse) enough, the action is cancelled. Making the same motion twice in a frenzy to beat a time limit also seems to sometimes cancel it and then, if there are more that two different things you can do in one spot, they tend to jump around on screen and change which direction you need to push so you have to re-read the on-screen instructions after every action. The last bit of gameplay is the dialogue, and man, is it irritating. It, too, is handled by the goofy direcitonal presses, but it also makes no sense. For one thing, the shorthand cues relating to what you can ask/say are overly vague, and I occasionally had trouble figuring out what I was trying to ask until I picked that one (think Mass Effect, only cut everything down to about one word instead of a short sentence). The other thing is that the game arbitrarily makes two decisions: who you are speaking as, and how much you get to talk. The first thing is very, very confusing when it first happens. I'm playing as Lucas Kane and I'm talking to someone, and suddenly my next choice controls what the OTHER character is saying. Again, it's their idea of "you play as everyone!" but it has no impact and I thought I was gonna ask this guy about something, not get a bunch of questions thrown at Lucas that I already know the answers to! Anyway, the other random choice the game makes is exactly how much you can talk to any one character; sometimes you can ask them about a bunch of different topics, and sometimes you can only ask one and then you're cut off. While this could make sense in a time-critical situation, it's absolutely ridiculous for a cop to stop an interrogation after only a single question. Several times, my thought process was, "I'll ask this first question, and then this other one," but the game decided that the first opening question was enough and my detective was sent on his way. So, if you read all the way down here, congratulations. I'm hoping nobody buys this, as it's the only legitimately BAD game on GOG right now. There are others I don't like, but that's almost always been due to the genre of the game in question. Do not buy Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy.
I gave this game a try on a whim, and I wasn't really all that impressed. The first issue I had with it was that it was pretty glitchy; for a little while I couldn't get the game to run at all, and then I found out I had to ensure ffdshow didn't run with it. Then, once I got into it, it crashed during the opening movie every single time. Okay, I can skip that; but then the game starts, and every bit of dialogue is played back multiple times, making the fairly frequent speech incredibly irritating. Turns out you have to disable hardware audio acceleration to fix this. Luckily, the community on here rocks. Anyway, the actual game wasn't that much better. Complaints about the ridiculous scarcity of ammo relative to the number/difficulty of monsters are well-founded; I understand that conservation of supplies has become an integral part of all modern horror games, but this was just ridiculous. The voice acting was also more than just irritating--even after fixing the triple-sound-playback problem--with special emphasis placed on the main character, who unfortunately has a lot to say. Now, the combat . . . Generally, I enjoy tactical-type games, turn-based or not. I just couldn't get into this one; it felt sluggish, a combination of a rather clunky HUD and poor animations. I liked some of the systems, like how different weapons have different firing lines and the importance of position--back and side attacks deal extra damage--and even the myriad status effects. I went into the game with the understanding that weapon skill has to be gradually built up with each character and that ammo was going to be scarce, so I figured that the melee weapons would deal decent damage but require no ammo, while the guns themselves would be significantly more powerful but be somewhat limited. This, however, is not really the case; some firearms are certainly powerful, but others are just as ineffective as the melee weapons at killing the various monsters. Obviously, building skill helps to solve this problem, but this means expending ammunition, and you don't have much of that. This game certainly sounded cool, but I was sorely disappointed. It's not a terrible game by any means, but I just couldn't overlook the rather terrible combat system, which is sort of a large part of the game.
