If you are a Douglas Adams fan, a huge point and click adventure fan running low on games to try, or just remember this game from your youth, then get this, but use a walkthru just to experience the story Adams put together. Otherwise, I cannot recommend this game. This game does not hold up very well. Nostalgia made me play it again, and in my opinion, the people reviewing from memory are doing a disservice to gamers that might be coming across this for the first time. Sound effects and talking are still crystal clear. The graphics are actually still pretty good as well. Nothing photo realistic and the colors are somewhat muted, but I played it on a 27 inch monitor and there is not as much pixelization as you would expect from a game this old. The atmosphere that the game is trying to project is spot on. Ah, game play. Not so great. You spend most of your time trying to navigate. This is the type of game where you click to move, although that might not actually move you where you expect. It might move you around a room, and turn you around in the process, and by the time you stop you aren't really sure where you are and what you haven't looked at yet (i.e like those big arrows on Google Maps). I didn't even know some rooms existed until I finally broke down and just followed the walkthru. Navigation also contains a lot of animations that I never found a way to bypass. So when you add in puzzles that make you backtrack all over the ship constantly, it gets annoying rather than fun. I think I probably could have figured out all of the puzzles myself eventually (and I consider myself an average gamer), so the puzzles make sense. But the unskippable animations eventually drove me to using a walkthru, and once I started using it I was happy to just follow the walkthru point by point and not even try to figure anything else out for myself. Yes, time makes a difference and this isn't a 1998 review. I can't give this more than 2 stars and I won't be playing it again.
Just like the first two games, this one has a soundtrack that stands on its own and voice acting that fits the game perfectly. The art and atmosphere are beautiful. This is the longest game of the series so far. Whereas Critter Chronicles takes about half the time to play as BoUT1, BoUT2 takes about time and a half. Also, most people's favorite character, Wilbur the gnome, is back, and we get to play him for a good portion of the game. In my review of Critter Chron I complained about illogical inventory puzzles. There are still some, but for the most part everything the characters do makes sense and you can think it through. This game continues the tradition of making fun of and referencing other video games and movies and whatnot. There seems to be less of that in this game than in the previous two, although there is still plenty to look for and plenty of laughs to be had. I did have an annoying bug where characters would get stuck. They had to be in just the right location before they started walking a particular path and to get in that location they took mini steps back and forth, usually something like 30 times in a row, before they snapped out of it. Once the character wouldn't snap out of it and I had to quit the game. Thank goodness for autosave. It's also getting to the point where we know these characters so well that we do and don't want to play some of them. So getting forced to play the characters you don't like (as much) is a real bummer. I know adventurers split up on adventures, and I'm not saying I have a solution. I'm just letting you know about something that lessened my enjoyment of the game. So overall, great looking, great sounding, longest yet addition to the series that is a lot of fun to play. The world, story, and characters are top notch. They really have some great writers. I just encountered one type of bug and had some nitpicks that keep me from giving it a perfect score. Note: for maximum enjoyment, play games in order: 1, CC, 2
Just like the first game, the production values in this series are off the charts. The game is gorgeous, the voice acting is amazing and the music is wonderful. The writing is also top notch and includes a lot of humor directed at and references to the video game, movie, and television genres. It also makes fun of things in the real world. I literally found myself laughing out loud at times. As other people have said, you are not playing the exact same characters as the first game. The gnome and the elf do not fit into the story line of this game so you only get to play the human Nate and Critter. (I won't dock any points for that, but I too fell in love with the gnome and his voice from the first game. He is missed.) Now for the bad. I consider myself fairly experienced in the adventure genre, and I found the inventory puzzles extremely tedious. There were many times when I just started trying to combine everything in my inventory to see if anything would combine and if that would give me a hint as to what to do next. Two times I gave up and looked at a walkthru (shh) to see what I should do next. And the combinations sometimes made no sense. It just seemed like a lot of the game was clicking around and doing things because they could be done, but not having any idea why your character was doing them. Personally, I find that more annoying than fun. (And this was not really an issue with the first game, which is why I gave the first game a full 5 stars.) So, overall, I would have given it 3 stars because of the puzzles which really detracted from the fun for me. And if the game didn't look and sound as good as it does it would have stayed there, but the games in this series are just so well done, and written so well, and so funny, I bumped it back up to a 4.
