Runaway: A Road Adventure

I don't know if it's a classic - only time can tell if Runaway deserves a place alongside the timeless - but this is the one of the most balanced and enjoyable adventures of these last years.

Filled with crazy characters from zany drag queens to menacing mafia men, the story line is definitely fun and entertaining.

The score reflects more the quality of the engine rather than the gameplay, but I liked the game well enough, and there is such a dearth of other adventures out there, that it’s a game worth owning if you enjoy the genre.

Runaway is a light-hearted romp with some genuinely humorous moments. My biggest disappointment was that Gina had no real role other than to look appealing and need rescuing.

The environments are lushly vivid, featuring top-notch hand-drawn art, and the puzzles can be maddeningly complex, so if you're looking for a solid adventure title, Runaway is the way to go. [Nov 2003, p.96]

A great-looking game, and can be very relaxing to play, but the illogical puzzles and sparse, uninteresting plot leave it feeling rather flat.

The bimbo of graphic adventure games: both pretty and stupid... When the puzzle solutions aren't illogical, they're horrifically repetitive. [Dec 2003, p.129]

Another classic of graphic point and click adventures. Intriguing story, charismatic characters with hints of humor and crazy puzzle solving. Mandatory for lovers of the genre.

Good Adventure, but i will not suggest it to new players who should look for more friendly staples. The story is somewhat strained in the beginning, but past chapter 1 it gets better, and the ending actually remedies the lopsided start. The puzzles are ok for the most part, some are believable, others - well, you gotta stretch your imagination and bend the rules a bit to count them valid puzzles. The main problem is the intentional item hiding on the designer's side. Terrible pixel hunting. Sometimes the protagonist enters an area and covers the item which is already hard to spot by default. I mean, Dev's, this game is oldish, i get it - but why would you hide things from the player in an Adventure genre? Why? I played all 3 games of the series. The last implementation is the best and resolves pretty much all my complains for the first two parts.

As a point-and-click lover, I really enjoy playing Runaway. The scenario and the universe are nice and the characters are very funny; going back and forth to try to solve enigmas is a challenge I am never tired to take. To me Runaway just has one default: some puzzles are difficult to solve, not because they require you to be very intelligent or to think a lot, but rather because the solutions are quite harebrained. I have found myself in situations where I had literaly no clue what to do, and just started trying all possibles interactions between pairs of objects, only to find one that was magically working in a way I would have never thought of. This kind of situation can be quite frustrating. But overall, I really enjoy the atmosphere and the puzzles of the game. If you like point-and-click, you have to play Runaway.

Most of the game time was spent in either (a) watching my toon take incredibly long walks across the screen or (b) watching incredibly long and uninteresting cut-scene sequences which could not be bypassed... This game motivated me to create an account and write a review. Which is saying something. I have never been so annoyed with a game. I don't think I laughed once, so if humor was intended it missed widely. The dialogue was about three times as much as necessary.

This game **** and I think the positive reviews are from shills. I like these kind of adventures, but the characters are annoying and the puzzles are stupid. This is a real letdown compared to something from Lucasarts. I feel ripped off.