Posted March 18, 2009
After about half an hour of playing:
1) Graphics: It looks quite OK, the backgrounds look the best, but characters are very crude and poorly animated, Broken Sword it ain't.
2) Sound: Voice acting is bad, it's flat and monotonous and really doesn't add any life to the characters. Soundtrack is so far split between perfect and really annoying and it plays all the time and not just in places (and times) where it'd fit and add to the atmosphere. And by default it's too loud so you can't hear the dialogues (and subtitles are off) so I recommend changing the settings as soon as possible.
3) Controls: are just bad. There are supposed to be two options- "bullet", where right-click brings a bullet theme menu with different actions (arrow=move/talk, hand=take, fist=hit, magnifier= look/examine, colt=shoot) and then cycling through the different cursors by right clicking. But the latter didn't work for me, when bullet option is disabled, right-click just brings up the menu, only without the bullet skin. Bug, I guess. The really annoying thing is, that you can't cancel the bullet menu for example by clicking outside of it, you have to choose one of the actions.
Active items do not have captions, you recognize an active item by moving an examine cursor over it at which point the cursor becomes animated. The same with other cursors, when you can pick something up, the hand makes a pick-up animation (and when you click, sometimes nothing happens and you have to move the cursor a little bit and find the right spot) etc.
You can get to game menu and inventory only by keyboard shortcuts, I would prefer pop-up menu at the edge of screen, which would preserve the clean interface and allowed a mouse-only controls. But if you have a more advanced mouse with some software, I guess you can remap the keyboard shortcuts to the redundant mouse buttons.
4)Logic and integrity: Not much of it so far. Jack refuses to rake throuh trash with disgust but picks up an aplle core and banana peel happily. Your neighbour asks you for a spoon and you give her a spoon you found in the prison cell (eeek). And the biggest of all is that they let you (as a murder suspect) investigate the case yourself, mess with the crime scene etc. But I've just started the game so it might get better. :)
5) Atmosphere: OK, so the main hero is a private detective, who drinks lot of whisky, is suspected murderer and has to prove his innocence in 48 hour ( oh, how original and inspiring!) so you'd guess a noir styled game, right? Ok, there is a moody jazz (or blues?, I never know) part of soundtrack but the graphic style is too colourful and clean and it looks more like a game for kids. But again, it could get better. :)
So far I had a few conversations (these are ok), picked up lot of items and used few of them (nothing elaborate yet), but if I already didn't pay for the game and was playing only demo, I guess I would give up, because it isn't very attractive or interesting game. Feels more like a (average) fan made game using one of the free adventure engines (AGS, Wintermute). But I'll finish it so I can write a review and mabe it'll surprise me pleasantly. :)
1) Graphics: It looks quite OK, the backgrounds look the best, but characters are very crude and poorly animated, Broken Sword it ain't.
2) Sound: Voice acting is bad, it's flat and monotonous and really doesn't add any life to the characters. Soundtrack is so far split between perfect and really annoying and it plays all the time and not just in places (and times) where it'd fit and add to the atmosphere. And by default it's too loud so you can't hear the dialogues (and subtitles are off) so I recommend changing the settings as soon as possible.
3) Controls: are just bad. There are supposed to be two options- "bullet", where right-click brings a bullet theme menu with different actions (arrow=move/talk, hand=take, fist=hit, magnifier= look/examine, colt=shoot) and then cycling through the different cursors by right clicking. But the latter didn't work for me, when bullet option is disabled, right-click just brings up the menu, only without the bullet skin. Bug, I guess. The really annoying thing is, that you can't cancel the bullet menu for example by clicking outside of it, you have to choose one of the actions.
Active items do not have captions, you recognize an active item by moving an examine cursor over it at which point the cursor becomes animated. The same with other cursors, when you can pick something up, the hand makes a pick-up animation (and when you click, sometimes nothing happens and you have to move the cursor a little bit and find the right spot) etc.
You can get to game menu and inventory only by keyboard shortcuts, I would prefer pop-up menu at the edge of screen, which would preserve the clean interface and allowed a mouse-only controls. But if you have a more advanced mouse with some software, I guess you can remap the keyboard shortcuts to the redundant mouse buttons.
4)Logic and integrity: Not much of it so far. Jack refuses to rake throuh trash with disgust but picks up an aplle core and banana peel happily. Your neighbour asks you for a spoon and you give her a spoon you found in the prison cell (eeek). And the biggest of all is that they let you (as a murder suspect) investigate the case yourself, mess with the crime scene etc. But I've just started the game so it might get better. :)
5) Atmosphere: OK, so the main hero is a private detective, who drinks lot of whisky, is suspected murderer and has to prove his innocence in 48 hour ( oh, how original and inspiring!) so you'd guess a noir styled game, right? Ok, there is a moody jazz (or blues?, I never know) part of soundtrack but the graphic style is too colourful and clean and it looks more like a game for kids. But again, it could get better. :)
So far I had a few conversations (these are ok), picked up lot of items and used few of them (nothing elaborate yet), but if I already didn't pay for the game and was playing only demo, I guess I would give up, because it isn't very attractive or interesting game. Feels more like a (average) fan made game using one of the free adventure engines (AGS, Wintermute). But I'll finish it so I can write a review and mabe it'll surprise me pleasantly. :)
