I smiled throughout game play due to how beautiful and quirky this world was. Its been awhile since just exploring a game was as satisfying as this. So many lovely moments, so many laugh out loud surprises, this is a game that I will keep and load up on those blue days to bring me cheer. pros: lovely unique art work and animations, quirky voice overs and sounds, hilarious animations, a decent sized world to explore and fiddle with as almost everything reacts to your mouse overs. The story is engaging, at times pretty dark. Many puzzles, I admit I had to use a walk thru more than once due to complexity. The sound track is very awesome, even my spouse turned away from witcher 3 inquisition to watch this game and laughed with me cons: a bit short of gameplay, it took me around 4-5 hours of leisure exploration. It can be hard to know what to do sometimes, I needed a walkthru a few times. Others may find the lack of any talking (human kind that is) guidance annoying but I found it charming. this game is right up there in my top ten list now. its timeless
the two stars are for the premise and the artwork which are great. the rest of the game play rots. If you enjoy starting over and over and losing whatever work you just hammered out as you 'learn' the game then this annoying game is for you. It ends up being just a learned sequence of activities that get you to survive the longest, dont stray from that plan or expect to start over and redo all the steps over again right to where you left off, then play for another 5 minutes before you run into something new .. which kills you ...then start over.... repeat ad nauseum. really dont understand the personality that finds repetition fun. do yourself a favor and watch a 'lets play' and see if its for you. i didnt and bought into all the 5star hype reviews, a common problem with gog.
I remember playing this back in the day and it scared the bejeebus out of me. Even then the controls and combat were annoying and I died often, but I put up with it due to the creepy atmosphere. Graphics were fine for the day. all that being said I would not think it would hold up to a new player who didnt have any rose colored memories of playing this. Read those reviews from first time players and see what I mean, the rest of the reviews are like me, ones who enjoyed it very much but from decades ago memory.
Let me just say that this game is one you'll love to play in spite of its horrid controls. this one kept me fiddling with graphics and control options for hours just because I was so invested in it after only an few minutes of gameplay. If you can last long enough to get used to the bizarre movement which resembles driving a tobogan over ice and complicated mouse interface and no less than10 different camera angle keys then its totally worth it. pros: delightful film noir done right, fantastic real star (james earl jones!) voice acting and live actor film clips, funky post apocalyptic cities to explore, awesome music track full of cool jazz which brings home the genre. sorta logical puzzles (its an adventure game after all so dont expect reality) that makes sense and actually can be worked out without a walkthru, intriguing story cons: the controls are a nightmare. you 'steer' with keybinds and give gas with the mouse, the camera does its own thing with too many idiotic key bindings to look up/down/right/left/sorta right/sorta left/behind/stand on toes/slither on ground etc. the gas via mouse gives a floating sliding feel to your char which usually means you continue to slide past your target, over react with your mouse and end up careening all over the place spinning like a top. you have an option to slow mouse movement which I did but it only helps a little. graphics are pixelated and tearing if you choose to increase your rez and go against the native windowed mode. my screen was offset to the right, cutting off interface controls which took a long time to fix. sliding around makes hotspot finding a chore, especially when you only get the cue for interaction from one tiny angle so 3d movement is not a blessing persevering thru all the control and graphic issues leaves you with a great game to listen to, enjoy, solve puzzles, laugh at the comedy, get creeped out and wonder what will happen next. In other words...an adventure game
the graphics are top notch, the animations well done, the inside jokes and humor fantastic. Whats not to love? well. ... for one..... countless hotspots that dont go away once used leads to almost infinite item combining when stumped, which is almost every level due to arcane, illogical and miraculous puzzle solving. In other words, you character lands into a new level with new goals to complete before the game progresses. Thats fine and is the enjoyable part. Exploring all the hot spots, getting the jokes and back story, talking to new npcs. Great! Then the game play kicks in and the unsolvable unless you play with an open walk through puzzles make the game very tiresome. You still hang there as each level is at first fun pure adventure. hours go by and you realize.. hey.. this isnt fun its a chore. It would be great if they let some of the not needed hot spots disappear after getting the text and joke. It would be great if quick travel worked all the time but many times no matter how many times I clicked the character would walk to the destination. It would be great if they allowed you to pick up objects as you find them, or allow different ways to solve puzzles or dropped better hints that the game wasnt allowing you to use an item just yet due to some other gateway needing to be triggered. Many times puzzles needed an object before the action could be triggered, but many many objects that would work are right there next to you or in your inventory already but nooooo, the game insists you back track myriad times in order to first build a super conductor rocketship out of cheetos first. *sigh add in over the top sexist female animations for extra nausea. I dont know, this game could have been stellar based on the graphics, animations, back ground art, story but filler game mechanics to stretch gameplay (ridiculous amount of backtracking needed) makes this more tiresome than fun. at least the lead male char wasnt such a jerk this time
Having just played the first installment Resurrection I can only hope the rest of the trilogy picks up in quality as Resurrection was a 360 borefest annoyance. If you enjoy spending hours panning a camera around looking for the 'exact' camera angle in order to find the needed hotspot then this game is for you. Panoramic view only means you get to pan the camera over flat matte paintings that are not interactable and lends nothing to gameplay except frustration over hot spot finding and nausea. For ex. your view shows a room with a table in the middle so the tendency is to walk straight to the table which you can clearly see. However, because the panoramic camera is only for looks and not functional, you then have to pan the mouse and camera to find the actual path you can take...which is usually way over to the corner of the room, stupid mechanic. Pros; nice graphics tho dated still are great to look at. Interesting close up dialogue interactions with the characters. decent voice acting. Nice ambient sounds for atmosphere. Cons: nauseating 360 panoramic camera leads to frustrating hot point hunting. You basically spend your time panning the camera over the monitor watching the pointer for any changes. Fun? no. Tiresome? YES. Puzzles are very simple and if not for hard to find hot points then the game would be very very short and linear. Overly sexist nude vampires and huge busts on the female characters made me feel like the devs were very lonely and frustrated 14 yr old boys. Can't minimize game without it shutting down. When loading the game and signing out are presented with overly long credit view, which gets old fast, as well as the intro plays every time and you have to click repeatedly out of it in order to load your game. small but irritating coding. Since I already picked up the trilogy in a bundle sale will play the rest of the installment with hope that the puzzle solving, graphics and annoying interface are fixed and improved on.
I've become leery of all the 5 star reviews in gog having found most old games are reviewed with those rose colored lenses of past thrills and not based on current date playstyle for the uninitiated, but for this game they are spot on. Never played this before and am totally loving it. I like the slow accrual of spells, gear and levels. I like the different party members and build your team the way you want. I like the crafting and very much enjoy the spell weaving, which at first seemed clumsy. Now I love crafting the spells each hit and not just spamming a spell button. I love the treasure hunts, and puzzle solving tho HATE the timed platformer like puzzles. I admit to having played with a walk thru on hand as its HARD. A few puzzles made me scream and throw my mouse. Good times eh. pros: interesting animations for spells, treasure hunting games and hidden rooms with rewards. Class differentiation makes for replayability. jump scares as beasties surprise you from behind or you fall thru traps. Mind bending puzzles, an engaging back story, in depth spell crafting and unique game mechanic to casting. Great sound ambiance let you know/dread whats around the corner, you get hungry and torches go out leaving you in utter darkness until you learn a spell to cast light. and so on cons: kinda dated graphics, enemies are strangely underpowered the higher levels, many a time I was cast into a dungeon with numerous enemies and still survived despite being cornered. The spell weaving can be cumbersome (ended up being my fav thing but at first was annoying) , timed platformer like puzzles are almost unbeatable leads to major frustration still...a great entertaining game, tempted to play thru again to try out diff group makeup.
Absolute rubbish keyboard/mouse controls make this game unplayable. Add in some really unintuitive multiple camera angles make for a nausea inducing nightmare. Every decision the devs made were out of left field, avoiding time honored key mapping and tutorials to crazy bizarre choices. If you love spending an hour or two tweaking controls and fighting against retarded camera angles before you even begin to play the game then this one is for you.
Pros: great atmosphere, intriguing story, lots of interactive bits in the environment to explore. As others have said has tones of Blade Runner. Use of the in game database adds another level of exploration as you try and glean info on this bleak planet and background of all the characters. flipping characters adds another dimension to explore and depth. Cons: take all the above and ruin it with idiotic combat involving complicated shooting sequences. you have to use cover and leave it to aim/shoot. sounds great but doesnt work very well. Add in crappy 'combat music' just ups the annoyance. So.. get ready to leave wonderful exploration adventure immersion for some ganky, timed clunky shooting scenes where you die in rapid order over and over again. The dev instituted autosave at the beginning of each combat thank god but it still sucks, isnt fun and ruins the pacing of the game. some clunkiness with the mouse menu over hotspots adds to click redundancy as you explore. in short, if the game didnt try to be more than an adventure game then it would have been stellar. as it is, it tries to add combat for no reason that I can figure out, perhaps to lure more combat oriented players to the game? if so, then the unintuitive interface and lack of precision fighting will turn them off. some players didnt have a problem with it but for me it ruined the game. 3stars for the rest of the good stuff in game
The interface man.. the interface. I realize this is an old classic but traipsing back and forth eternally in mazes where the wrong click can send you off on a tangent to who knows where is just not fun. Pros; Very good soundtrack, when I finally gave up I left the game running just so I can listen to the music. Very well done and atmospheric, as well as the intro. Artwork was pretty good for its day, tho grainy and dated nowadays, but I didnt mind that unless it obscured what an item was. The concept was also very innovative and weird enough to suck you into the trip. I may try to go back and finish the game, perhaps a beer or three would help alleviate aggravation so I could. Cons: having enormous mazes with no actionable items in them just seems to me to be filler, to extend the play life of the game. Room after room with useless zoom actions on every light fixture or column base quickly ran out of wow factor, add in that you have to transverse these mazes over and over just added up to a whole lotta of ugh. I was one of the players who made that game finisher error early in the game, thank god I read a wiki on it and found out when I did rather then losing hours trying to make it work. For me the worst part was the overly complicated menu actions, whenever I just wanted to back out of some worthless zoom look I invariably ended up in another room, or you could see doors that were on either side but if you advanced your char ended up in another room entirely. I hope the devs make another game with todays standards for point and click, I am sure their eye for innovative story telling, music immersion and graphical art will make it a winner, but for this classic I have to skip it.
