I'll admit up front that I've only played the demo, but the issues that are preventing me from buying the game are all pretty apparent and unlikely to be significantly different in the rest of the game.The biggest thing is the "puzzle" design, for want of a better term. Need to buy a newspaper from a vending machine? OK, use machine. Nope, you need money! OK, get your wallet from your inventory and use it on the machine. Haha, this machine takes credit cards, not wallets! You actually have to get your credit card out of your wallet and use it on the machine. This isn't a puzzle, it doesn't add anything to the game other than frustration.
And this is far from the only example of needlessly tedious gameplay. Need to search a filing cabinet for a specific file? Well, it could be one click, since your character knows exactly which file he wants, but how about instead you make the player search each of the four drawers separately and type in the name of the file each time?
Need to open a locked door to which you have the key? Well, get the key out of your inventory, because otherwise your braindead character will just keep trying to open the door without unlocking it.
Need to open or shut a valve? Your character needs to be told which way to turn it every. single. time.
Then there's the way the characters behave in completely bizarre and unrealistic ways. The train you're on suddenly stops for some reason, so you force the doors open and walk off into a pitch black subway tunnel instead of just waiting for the problem to be fixed. No sane human behaves this way.
Or how about this: You're a detective on the scene of an explosion. An employee at the building tells you someone's trapped inside. Do you call an ambulance? The fire department? Of course not, just break in and check if there really is anyone in there first, risking your own life (and that of this guy you just met) for no reason.
Add some awkward, unnatural dialogue, an interface that's constantly just slightly frustrating and (at least in the demo) some puzzles where it's never made clear what you're actually trying to accomplish or why until you stumble on the solution, and you have a recipe for a game that's not quite bad enough to make you quit in frustration, but isn't actually fun at all.
It's always disappointing to see Wadjet Eye pushing these inferior products, because the games they make themselves (specifically the Blacwell series) are the best adventure games ever made and a great example of what the genre should be like, but everything else they publish is absolute garbage.
Don't buy this game, it's terrible.
That's a shame, about the only thing I had wrong with the game was the occasional point where the characters stood in front of one another.
ReplyDeleteThe inventory was at times a bit fiddly, but nothing unmanageable. You could often combine items before the 'plotline' enabled it, so if it was logical to put duct tape on a pipe, it let you do it without making you encounter the puzzle that needed it in the first place. Once you get used to how the inventory worked, it's fairly smooth sailing, all games have at least some learning curve.
As for your other issues with the plot, 1) If I was alone on the subway, I'd probably try and at least get out. 2) He did call for an ambulance, there was no proof that anyone was actually hurt yet, or even -in- the facility. Ed didn't know if Dr Morales was inside, nor did the janitor. At least he -helped- Ed in finding out, rather than waiting outside for emergency services, like most police would. 3) The direction of the valve mattered.
The puzzles in the full game were good and they did make sense in the full storyline, the plotline interesting. I feel you're judging it a bit too harshly for being the demo, where they can't reveal all of the plotline, so the puzzles/plotpoints seem a little bare and unexplained.
The ingame hinting is some of the smoothest game prompting I've encountered, where talking to one another lead to the least suggestion of where to go next without breaking the fourth wall.
The best thing, imo, was running with the commentary on, like in other WEG, it was occasionally somewhat spoilery, but overall very entertaining to listen to bloopers and explanations of choices.
The main issue I had with the inventory was that half the time dragging stuff didn't work. I think it was to do with trying to do stuff too rapidly; if you did one thing and then another it wouldn't register the second thing unless you waited a second or two.
ReplyDeleteOh, and the short-term memory thing is an interesting idea but really badly executed. For example, when Ray is trying to hack into the mainframe and needs the receptionist to leave, you have to drag the clock into STM, then talk to her, then drag the clock back out of STM. It works fine in theory, but it meant a lot of stopping and starting as I tried different things, until I gave up and just put every object in the room into STM (which was then annoying because any time that menu popped up it was massive).
I will grant you that the puzzles mostly seemed pretty reasonable, the problem was that each one was surrounded by a ton of busy-work (like the valve thing - direction did matter, but only in the sense that trying to go the wrong way did nothing at all so you wasted a little bit of time) and the characters seem to require you to do almost all their thinking for them (like the wallet thing or the bit where Ed wakes up and you figure out the sound is coming from the laundry basket, and then have to actually tell him to get the pants out of the basket and then get the phone out of the pants).