Jack Orlando: A Cinematic Adventure - Director's Cut
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1933 will go down in the history books as the year America passed the 21st Amendment to the Constitution. The Prohibition is over. To the delight of millions, alcohol can now flow freely across the thirsty land. Two days before the official announcement...
1933 will go down in the history books as the year America passed the 21st Amendment to the Constitution. The Prohibition is over. To the delight of millions, alcohol can now flow freely across the thirsty land. Two days before the official announcement, bars and clubs across the land are stocking up on quality whiskey.
This is the enthralling story of a scruffy but shrewd private investigator who, by an unfortunate mixture of circumstances, becomes the prime suspect in a mysterious murder case. Jack now has only 48 hours to slip the noose and find the real offender. The sands of time are rapidly running out and Jack has to unravel the mysterious plot he now finds himself caught up in the middle of.
Eye catching hand-drawn animated graphics
A classic film noir atmosphere with a great musical score
Ok, Jack Orlando is a good old-school adventure game. The setting, plot and characters are just like in the old "noir films", so if you like this kind of movies - as I do - you will probably love the game. However, the game fails in may other aspects: the main character is not very likeable, the voice acting is terrible, some puzzles are irrational, you can die (that's something I don't like in adventure games) and you can pick up too many useless objects you don't have to use (and believe me, is hard to tell which one is useless and which one is not).
So, in a nutshell the game is good, but doesn't play in the same league as Lucas or Revolution.
This game is average at it's best. It has quite beautiful hand drawn backgrounds, some of them animated, sometimes someone just walks past or car drives by, the city just feels alive. Characters are worse, especially the close-ups during dialogues look very crude. Cutscenes are the worst, they look crude just like the close-ups and the style and colour palette are like from a kiddie cartoon.
Voice acting is really bad, sound effects sound sometimes very artificial and there are some bugs as well (at one location, there is sometimes echo when Jack speaks and when he says someting different there is not). Music ranges from perfect to annoying (but downloadable soundtrack would be welcomed).
Controls are literally broken, according to manual, there should be two control options (one a bullet themed menu at right-click, where you pick the commands, second cycling through the commands with right-click) but you get only the menu, the second time without the bullet skin. Then you need keyboard to get to inventory or menus, which is not ideal as well.
Puzzles are sometimes ok, sometimes illogical. Jack nor other characters help you very much (solutions doesn't often come from dialogues or Jack's internal monologue). Items appear at convenient places out of nothing. You can't examine items once you pick them up to give you any clue what to do with them. Some garbage items are active and you can pick them up, some aren't and there is no internal logic, why you can pick up a banana peel and not a wrench which would seem more useful. I know it's common but it's annoying and stupid anyway.
One of two biggest problems is writing. The plot is unoriginal from the start and it really doesn't get any better. Many of the situations are illogical or downright absurd (beginning with the premise that they let you, as a suspected murderer, investigate the case , mess with the crime scene etc) and dialogues are cheesy at best. Characters are poorly written and many of them are bloody stupid, especially the police force is a bad joke.
The second is lack of atmosphere. Despite the classical noir premise (detective suspected of murder, has 48 hours to prove his innocence), the game is not noir at all, it isn't a thriller as well. There is just no tension despite the fact that you can die many times (sometimes you can't knowingly avoid the game over, it happens for example when you enter a location). At the begining you can get to only a few locations but soon almost the whole city opens to you, which means like...I don't know 50 screens? (and there are more to come) And there are tons of rubbish Jack can (and will if you let him) pick up, which can be quite perplexing. You wander around the city freely like you were a tourist and never feel like you should act quickly or you'll be doomed. And Jack himself acts as everything was cool, no matter that he sometimes tells the opposite. That's a huge con for this kind of game. At one time you get to a location that looks like it suddenly fell from a different game (but maybe it's some kind of a homage to Broken Sword, who knows). And the graphic style is too colourful, some of the locations would fit more to a comedy game (the last act especially reminded me of a Czech comedy adventure series Polda).
Pros:
beautiful living backgrounds
big part of the soundtrack
many many locations
some of the dialogue lines (mostly Jack's) are cheesy in the cool way
a few rewarding puzzles
Cons
it's very very very very stupid
lack of atmosphere
problematic controls
feels amateurish
part of soundtrack is annoying
there are really many many locations (depends on your taste)
you can (and will) die a lot of times, possible dead end(s?)
the end is really painful
Result: not worth the money, really not worthy of GOG.
The idea of a Noir styled detective story for an adventure game sounds great, unfortunately Jack Orlando fails to deliver.
Puzzle wise, you are going to pick up a lot of rubbish. Both in odd junk to solve puzzles, and actual trash. The trash appears to have no use other than to fill up your inventory. What is even worse, is that on a few occasions, Jack will complain about picking up stuff. So, that odd gadget is no good, but rotten fruit is okay???
Some puzzles can also only be activated if you speak to someone in a certain order. It's hard to get stuck, but unless Jack is told of a location, what he needs will not be there. Half the time, you can even go there before you are told about it.
There is also lots of empty scenes. Now, while I'm not against these to fill out the world a little, it just feels too much here. Especially when there is no interaction in them, even just for commentary.
Audio - is pretty much average. I didn't find the voice work too bad (though dialogue is another issue), but the music was fairy nice & atmospheric at times.
Graphically, it's a little unimpressive, and sometimes requires too much pixel hunting. The short cutsceens are decent, and they did try something new with using them overlayed into a scene to highlight a few things of importance.
Also you can die. Sometimes, it's unexpected when you reach a scene where this can happen. So it's best to save every so often, as there is no retry option.
Overall summery: Unless you are really into adventure games, and are willing to be more than a little forgiving: Avoid this one.
Right out of the way, I have to say that the hand drawn art style is a plus. While other studios in the late 90's had tried their hand at full motion video, not a lot of development studios had yet realised what a potential disaster choosing live action was. Very few games have managed to adequately use filmed segments in their games (e.g. The Wing Commander games, Tex Murphy) and too many smaller studios tried their hardest to keep up with this trend and failed miserably at it. The animations in Jack Orlando are all individually inked, making sure that the little things that irritate you are taken care of: feet and hands properly reaching rungs on a ladder, footfalls staying in the same place, etc. Most of the music is pretty good too, though a far flung style from the expected 1930's jazz/standards.
All that said, the rest of this game was a massive disappointment. The character himself, Orlando, we are led to believe was a pillar of the community turned washed out drunk. We are never shown an example of WHY he's become a washed out drunk, and almost told to take it as fact because "that's the way P.I.'s are." This problem plagues every character in the game thereafter, not a one of them demonstrates any depth or interesting history (the introduction the game treats us to a short montage of Jack's exploits which include him rescuing a girl from presumably drowning in the ocean... not really a perfect example of great Private Detective skills) befitting them. The bad guys are just bad guys, the good guys are just good guys and traitors are just traitors.
The 'puzzling' system is similarly flawed. An armada of useless, yet obtainable items litter the streets, drawers, nooks and crannies of this oddly designed city with very little indication of what separates them from the necessary. Once picked up, the only interaction you have with your inventory is to use them; no examination at all. I picked up a file at one point in the game which became a crucial part of the end, only to discover I was unable to *READ* the file, causing me to underestimate its use. The clues on how to solve puzzles (and indeed where the puzzles ARE) are just as indecipherable. Having walked past a chinese laundry, I learned later it was a puzzle to get the proprietor to stand out in front... the solution? Give a character a day old newspaper (who mentions nothing about wanting one), so he can tell you he's just read that a chinese laundry opened.
Being a fan of the works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet, I had high hopes for this title. Its pedestrian plot, lack of character development, and convoluted inventory/puzzle interaction disappoint. Rather than a complicated and gripping mystery with realistically conflicted characters in a user friendly interface we are treated to one dimensional simple story elements and makework difficulty to increase the playability of a game I found increasingly difficult to stomach as it dragged on.
I did like most of the art and music though.
First, let me say, I love adventure games. I've played all of the old school popular games all the way back to Sierra's KQ1. I enjoy all of those, even with the cheap deaths and illogical puzzles. This game though, Jack Orlando, is absolutely the worst adventure game I've ever played.
Story/Presentation: The story is rather silly and that's the biggest part of an adventure game. What really hinders it though is the fact that the dialogue is absolutely horrific. Easily some of the worst voice acting I've ever heard. Plus the dialogue itself is just complete garbage. I turned on subtitles so I could read what they were saying instead of waiting to listen to the voices and seriously, it's like this thing was written by a five year old. This is no exaggeration. Normally I can handle bad voice acting and dialogue, but it really really ruins the game and brings it down a whole level.
Graphics: The graphics are decent at best. Though considering the game was made in the late 90s, there are other games from the same time that blow this game out of the water graphically. The game talks about having a bunch of high class artists draw all the backgrounds and everything, but I have to say, it looks more like something a child would do for art class.
Sound: The music is alright. I tend not to notice music in games for the most part unless it's really annoying. It didn't stand out to me, so it's passable.
Gameplay: Seriously flawed and poorly designed gameplay. It really is like this thing was developed by five years old kids. There are tons of items you can pick up in every screen, but literally 90% of them are useless. They even make a point of that in the manual. That is not good game design. When you do pick something up you can't examine it so sometimes you don't even know exactly what it is. Ridiculous. Then the puzzles are often completely illogical. So it all compounds on top of one another to create just terrible gameplay. On top of that there are tons and tons of locations, many of which I'd say are totally unnecessary. It's like they did it to pad the length of the game. And yes, as others have said you enter an old tomb at one point such as in Broken Sword, but it makes no sense in the context of this game. They don't even explain it. Absolutely ridiculous.
Oh, and yes they have deaths in this game. Something the good developers learned to do away with by the time this game was released. While I can handle dying in a game, it's really poor design when after you die you are forced to reload a save. I didn't realize I was entering a timed and dangerous situation at one point and hadn't saved for a decent amount of time. Died and stopped playing because I didn't want to go through all of the crap again. Apparently the concept of retrying such scenes didn't occur to the developers. Pathetic.
And overall that is what I'd have to say about this game. It's really a pathetic attempt and easily one of, if not the, worst offering on GOG. This is by no means in any way a good adventure game. It's more a compilation of all the terrible ideas from the early days of adventure games wrapped up with a terrible story, horrific voice acting and dialogue, and boring art. Definitely give this game a pass if you can. This is a game I would totally return if GOG allowed it.
