hfffoman

The graphics are terrible, arty but ridiculously low resolution. The mechanics are clunky, with slow menus and too much time watching pixellated figures crossing the screen painfully slowly. Some of the puzzles are good, some are annoying. It isn't consistent, e.g. most exits are identified my mousing over, but some only if you move the character to the edge of the screen. E.g. there is a system of storing info useful for solving puzzles but some of the info stored is irrelevant and some vital info is not stored. E.g. to combine items in inventory you pick up A and mouse it over B - message telling you that's a dumb idea, but it turns out you need to pick up B and mouse it over A. The story is good, though some of the elements don't fit together.

This is more a story than a game though it has freedom of navigation and dialogue choices which are important as the game is basically a dialogue. The story is moving and psychologically mature making it well worth playing, but be warned everything else about the game is very basic and there are some gross programming errors where obsolete dialogue options aren't removed from the menus. The developers could fix this in 10 minutes. I also recommend The White Chamber by the same person. In my view it is equally good and was released free 10 years ago.

How did this get so many good reviews? I gave it half an hour before deciding not to waste my time as well as my money. I have enjoyed dozens of adventure games including plenty that were made 10+ years before this and are still vasty superior to its cheap 2d images and laggy menus. Avoid

This is my favourite of dozens of adventure games I have played going back to the very first days of Kings Quest. Why? Because every aspect of the game is first rate: the future society depicted is rich and convincing; the visuals are beautiful; the voices are excellent, the characters are lifelike; the speech scenes are long, complex and realistic; and the puzzles are varied, challenging and interesting. I have to take issue with some negative comments. The reviewer who complains Culpa Innata is only **** is being unfair. Yes, the sequel is essential and I feel cheated that it is still not available. However, this game gives you a full game's worth of story, character and challenge. As for the comment that the dialogue is monotonous, this must have been written by someone who wants short shallow dialogue. This game has long dialogue which really opens up the characters and makes you feel part of their world, much closer than most games to the feeling you get from reading a good novel. There are some well crafted dialogue puzzles with complex trees which are genuinely difficult to navigate to a winning outcome though you don't lose the game overall if you fail. (Sorry for duplicating my previous review got truncated somehow)

This is a slimmed down version of Heroes of Might and Magic combined with a slimmed down version of Civilisation. This idea is good but unfortunately it isn't good enough. The heroes part is a feeble caricature of the original (for example a high initiative can be to your disadvantage because there is no wait function; the character development doesn't quite work either), and the Civ part feels a little cartoony it is like playing Elder Scrolls and then switching to Torchlight. There are some clunky mechanics too, for example if your army travels through a city you have to take each member out individually in a complex click and slide action. Sometimes you click on a destination and before you can stop them, your troops have left the road and taken a vastly longer route, wasting 2-3 turns. The story game is particularly very weak. Feels like it was written by a GCSE student over a weekend. On top of that the scenario creator would crash the game consistently on certain settings. On the plus side, the menus are clear and you can work out how the Civ mechanics work more easily than in the original.

A decent improvement on the previous game in the series but with 2 major problems. The DRM system is terrible. Basically you have to be logged on in order to play properly. When the server is down (as while I write) you can't play at all. If the connection drops (which happens mysteriously frequently considering I have a very good broadband), you immediately get kicked, losing your progress. The next problem is the bugs. It has taken more than 2 years to correct a bug so fundamental it beggars belief where mana costs rise to ridiculous levels making the game unplayable. (You can play, you just can't use a lot of your skills, and you can't reassign them either). This happens in the first chapter of the main campaign. How did they not spot it? Even though it has finally been fixed, they didn't bother to include a utility that would have taken half an hour to write, to correct your savegames, which are now corrupted. To ruin a good game like this is lunacy.

I am downgrading my score from when it first came out because of some annoying bugs. On two occasions I suffered a rollback which meant I went back to an earlier version of my character, losing all progress. Each time it cost me a day's play. I believe they are aware of the problem but chose to do nothing about it. The rest of my review still stands - the game is fantastic fun to play though I found the story a bit weak.

Extreme good and bad points. Very good graphics, very good gameplay, very unimaginative quests making the game tedious, very annoying intrusive way of trying to get you to spend real money all the time to speed up progress which is very slow. It reminds me of Guild Wars but somehow doesn't give quite the same feeling of really being there, it's more **** and less emotionally engaging.

I think the reviewers are being unfair on this game. It does not feel like a full commercial adventure game published in 2006. It's price, and its production, indicate that it is closer to a casual adventure game. On that scale it is a very good game. it will keep you interested for much longer than most casual games as it is constantly challenging in original and interesting ways. Many times I was stuck for a while and when I found the solution I felt pleased with myself, rather than annoyed with the game for presenting such an illogical problem (let's face it adventure games are somewhat prone to that). Maybe I have an odd sense of humour but when someone tells me an adventure game has great humour I usually find it makes me want to laugh about as much as watching clowns throw custard pies at each other and fall over their shoe laces i.e. not at all. Yet this game with its anti-hero loser is genuinely funny, often in unexpected and creative ways. Finally, if you like ragtime, the music is the best ragtime I have ever heard. If anyone knows where I can find the score please let me know.

Brilliant game. The person who complained about the AI is playing the wrong type of game. You aren't supposed to stand still and watch your players fight. You are supposed to think and work out how to use your team's mix of skills, and tell them what to do. It works very well: in hard battles you can keep pausing to keep track of everything going on and give new instructions. In easy battles you can give a few commands and let it play out. The really great thing about the game is the moral dilemmas. Time and again I was suprised that a quest to go and beat someone up turned into an interesting conversation where I became sympathetic to them and had to think to decide what to do. This is gaming at its very best.

A beautifully atmospheric game. Just try the demo and you will buy it straight away. The dialogue and acting are brilliant. You feel like you are dealing with real people. The ending is a terrible letdown but in every other way it was worth 10.

I have had hours of fun with this game. It is beautifully atmospheric, has a good story, and a combat system capable of enormous sophistication. The world it creates feels very real and I actually cared about its fate.

Very well designed and fun to play. Despite all the variations and thrills, and achievement badges, it remains a casual game in which you have little more to do than make 3 colours in a row thousands of times. The timed versions of the game put you under so much pressure you have no time to think or plan ahead. The versions with no time limit allow some scope to plan ahead and get a better score. I played for a few hours and had a lot of fun but it soon became repetitive.

A simple casual game but very enjoyable with puzzles that are challenging enough to be interesting, but never annoying. Altogether a triumph of artistic programming. I really don't see how someone can object to paying $10 for it. It isn't meant to be an adventure game so of course there is no story, but it gives you several hours of gameplay and creates a pleasant atmosphere and relaxing play.

Lots of fun effects and good gameplay but there is no atmosphere and it feels utterly pointless. I played for a while and it was so repetitive I got very bored.

The graphics are very very pixellated. I simply don't understand why a modern game didn't use better quality rendering. I also don't understand why everyone has voted against Dantheman's review. His comments are spot on and the recommendation to check out the demo is essential advice to all prospective purchasers

Try the demo before buying. The game has a cartoon graphics feel that makes the atmosphere rather feeble. I don't believe it is JJ at her best by a long way

The game is beautifully atmospheric and very innovative. There's an awful lot I loved about it. I can't give it a good score though because the gameplay was so frustrating that I gave up after a few desperately frustrating evenings in which everything happened excruciatingly slowly. I normally have so much patience it is almost a mental abnormality, but I didn't have enough patience for this.

Very beautiful game with interesting story. For me it didn't quite live up to the hype. It was slightly frustrating to play (I am a seasoned adventure fan), with puzzles that sometimes felt contrived and a lot of time spent watching the character walk slowly around the screen. I am nit-picking though. It's in the middle of the first league which is, for me, topped by Culpa Inata, Azrael's Tear, the Last Express, and The Longest Journey.

Despite its age it is still worth playing. It is one of the most atmospheric adventure games ever produced and has some interesting innovations of game play.

Only suitable for kids who are so young their parents will have to do most of the playing. Even making allowance for that, it is short and feeble. There are a few funny moments, hence the score as high as 1.

Morrowind has a couple of features that make it stand out above any other RPG I have played. First the story is intertwined with history as set out in books and quests and is just like reading human history. There are different accounts, different opinions, ambiguous reports. The picture you build up is incomplete and often makes you revise your judgements about which historical characters are good and which are evil. Eventually you realize that just as in real life, there is often no clear boundary. Second, the game world is so convincing and lifelike, it draws you in until you feel like you have actually been there and witnessed the events. All RPGs try to do this but Morrowind (and Oblivion) do it better because the physics is better. Most games impose limits on what a character can do e.g. there is an object, therefore you cannot go there. In Morrowind, you can move anything if it is light enough and not fastened, jump on anything if your jumping skill is good enough, climb any terrain if your you have the capability. You have to try this. It is very realistic, and fun.

Of course this is very dated now but anyone interested in past adventure games should definitely play it. The atmosphere in its vast underground ancient religious complex is as awe-inspiring as any modern game with superior graphics. The haunting organ music is so good I would leave the game running so I could listen to it. The story is complex and working out which of the characters could be trusted was an extremely interesting challenge.

A highly quirky, stylish and delightful game. The puzzles were often very clever and often made me think hard. Its cartoony flash animation style without spoken dialogue is part of its charm but makes it feel closer to a casual amateur game than a commercial adventure game. One criticism is that you will often have to go back and forth between several screens and those sweet little robots take an awful long time to do it. there's a good demo available, worth testing. half way between a commercial game and a casual amateur game.

This is a first rate classic of adventure gaming and the metascore of only 75 shows that critics who get bored if they haven't killed anything for 5 seconds, and can't resist sniping at adventure games, shouldn't review them. Dreamfall has a wonderful story and provides a captivating experience.

Despite some good features, Alternative fails as an adventure game experience. The biggest weakness was the clunky game design. For example you are standing next to a large object and try to interact with it. The programmer has determined that the character must be not just next to it but in a particular location next to it. He therefore walks painstakingly slowly to that location, often for no purpose as there may be no interaction possible at that moment. This slows the game down and becomes very annoying. Most of the game time is spent watching him move slowly across the screen. You also have to do every little activity in the right order. Thus you are required to read a car numberplate and tell it to someone. You click on the numberplate to bring up the close-up screen, memorize it, cross several screens to meet your colleague, but there is no dialogue option. What you should have done was get to the close up screen and then click on the numberplate again, so the character realizes that he knows it. This sort of thing happens frequently and invariably means you have to go back and forth between locations, watching the hero walk slowly all the time. Another example. You are in a room with a friend. You have just acquired item A and you know you need item A and item B to achieve a task. You need your friend's help to get item B. Unfortunately, the right dialogue option does not appear until you have crossed town, tried using item A on its own, and heard your character say, "I need item B" Then you have to go back to your friend and the dialogue option will appear. Alternativa has some novel approaches to puzzles, for example a combination lock where, instead of searching for clues, you have to spend a minute testing all the combinations. That was neat. This is a clever example of a solution that is similar to what you would do in the real world. Some of the reality touches are just annoying. You hunt all over for a clever solution but the solution is just to go back to you friend and ask for the item you need. I could go on and on. There were plenty more little irritations. The graphics are very good. The animation, e.g. when your character performs an action, is appallingly poor. The English language voice overs are mediocre. The sound effects are reasonable. For the low price it would be just worth it if it wasn't so slow.