My biggest issues with the game: horrible movement and action controls. More than once I noted my character going in wrong direction after camera change. Also the four button action scheme is a bit frustrating. There's also some annoying box pushing puzzles, that take only time and aren't very innovative or fun. Other than that, I don't have any issues with the game. The plot does get a bit ridiculous towards the end, but all in all Broken Sword 3 is an entertaining game.
There is a one, small, but quite annoying flaw in the Feeble Files: the user interface. The inventory, saving, loading, accessing the in game encyclopaedia and settings are done via watch communicator, that is poorly designed. The listing of saved games takes a while, especially if you have saved a lot of games. This is also the problem with encyclopaedia, which has quite a many entries, so accessing it might get a bit boring, as each time you open it you have to see the communicator slowly listing all the entries before you can access them. I also found, that the game control icons aren’t very intuitive and I kept scrolling over the one I needed in a multiple occasions. Luckily the game itself is far better than its interface. The graphics, voice acting and animations are well done and mostly fun. There’s a couple of puzzles of which with out I could have lived with. The most annoying and an almost game stopper is in the latter half of the game. You need to play through an annoying amount of boring arcade games in order to get enough tokens to proceed. Luckily you can cheat your way through there thanks to SCUMMvm. All in all, The Feeble Files is pretty fun sci-fi adventure well worth the GOG price. It’s just sad, that the UI is a bit of a chore.
Back in the day, when 2D graphics were getting old school, game developers decided, that bringing everything in 3D was the must thing. This also happened with adventure games, such as King’s Quest, Monkey Island and Simon the Sorcerer. In most cases the change was clunky, but some what enjoyable. In Simon the Sorcerer 3D it was a disaster. The biggest problem, besides the horrible looking and badly textured characters, is the big game world, which is empty and boring. You spend most of the time running, or teleporting to selected areas, around and try to look for something sensible to do. Also the controls are badly lacking. In a short conclusion Simon 3D is a very disappointing game, even if you have low expectations. The humour of the previous games is there, but the game play is so poorly executed, that I just can’t recommend the game.
1984, that's the year King's Quest 1 was originally released and here it is, still being sold over 20-years later. For its time King's Quest was quite an innovative game, as it had animated, 16 colored graphics, multiple rooms and you could even move the character around so, that a tree or a house would hide it from the view. That all was in a word, revolutionary, when you add the level of interactivity the game has, which ain't that much in todays standards. Let it be made fully clear: I like these games because I was a kid, when I played them the first time and they made an impact on me. There's a lot of nostalgia present, there's no denying that. The first 2 games are very slim with plot and they basically are more of a random item searching games than coherent narratives. 3rd game has the best plot of the bunch. King's Quest 1 (*** / *****) The story is simple enough: old king is dying and he wants Sir Graham to find three lost objects, which could bring wealth back to the kingdom of Daventry. These items are magical mirror, which can foresee the future, a chest full of gold and magical shield, that protects who ever fields it. To fully complete the game, it actually helps, if you are familiar whit fairy tales. There actually is an official Sierra remake of KQ1, which is basically the same game, but with better graphics. It still has the parser interface, but the difficulty level is toned down a bit. King's Quest 2 (** / *****) Easily the weakest of the first three. The plot involves now king Graham to travel in the country of Kolyma, which is a pretty empty place, if not counting dracula, church an antique store and red riding hoods granny's house. You mainly spend time walking, collecting things and then you get through the portal to the enchanted island to save the girl. There really isn't even as much of a narrative there's in the first game. King's Quest 3(**** / *****) To Heir is Human is story wise the best of the first three. You start the game as a slave to an evil wizard, of whose grasp you need to escape. The game has a lot of timed tasks and you are on the clock, when trying to locate the ingredients to make the spells you need to get rid of the wizard. The game also has a nice magic map, that helps you move around a bit faster. The item hunt has a lot more meaning this time. General thoughts of all three So, when you go out and star adventuring, you'll notice, you rummage through every hole and crevice in order to find the stuff you need in order to advance the game. This goes to all three. You can also miss an important item and end up stuck somewhere, where you can get out by only loading a saved game. You also die a lot, be that by a gaze of medusa, maddened mage or just by drowning in the river. You give the commands with a text parser, so in many cases you'll spent more time in figuring the right commands (like ”take dagger” or ”cut rope with dagger”) and reading the notice, that the game doesn't understand you. I can't say anymore, if the commands are hard to figure, as I know the game almost by heart, but considering people, who are accustomed on modern mouse driven interfaces, this kind of verb hunting might cause gray hairs. I've never thought that highly of the graphics in the first 3 King's Quest games. They look okay, a bit crude if you compare them to todays games, but I've never thought them as off putting. There also isn't that much of music or sound effects in the games, so it not an audiovisual feast. But all in all, King's Quest 1 to 3 are a nice, nostalgic trip for those, who have first played them back in the 80's. To younger they might shed some light about the history of gaming. ”3D” adventures were, after all, a big hit after solely text based Interplay Zork games. As a side note, you can find a fan made VGA remakes of all three games . Remakes of 1 and 3 are very accurate, but remake of KQ2 adds much plot and surroundings to the game.
For me Iceweind Dale is an disappointing game. Essentially the game is just another hack and slash RPG, with very straight forwared narrative. There really isn't much of a sense of exploring the world, as new places open up the pace you follow the story. The game itself is just mostly beating up enemies in different area until you manage to complete the main quest at hand. After that you get to go to another place and repeat the same. ID is not a bad game as such, but if you are expecting similar game play to Planescpae: Torment or Fallout games, you might be disappointed.
