Lucien21Guild Master
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Joined: 9 JUL 2003
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Status : Offline | Rhodan : Myth of the Illochim
A science Fiction game based on a hugely sucessful book series (He's Germany's Flash Gordon) you play as Rhodan an immortal who has lived for 3000 years and is currently Regent of Terra (Earth). When his friend and ex-lover Mondra is kidnapped he goes on a quest to find her and rescue her in a quest that will take him across space.
Pro
* An extremly detailed storyline and background in this game can see you pull up detailed information about most of the characters and items in the game. There are plenty of hotspots to comment on, reading material and characters to talk to that add to the atmosphere and backstory. With over 2000 books in print that's not surprising, but it does a great job of making sure it's not essential to have read any of them (I haven't)
* Superb graphics where you can tweak things like the Anti Aliasing level to the shadowmaps and number of background characters to optimise performance on most PC's. The character models with real time shadows and superbly rendered backgrounds are not essential to a good game, but helps with the immersion into the gameworld. - My personal fav levels were the Dark and almost Blade Runner esque Elmo Dater scenes.
* A very good range of puzzles mostly inventory, but some logic puzzles (one of which will frustrate). Mostly they fit in with the objectives of the game and the storyline.
* Nice interface with not just inventory items but conversation topics being at the bottom, a Scan key allows for hotspot finding, exits having a nice little picture of the next room (if you had been there before) and a right click to instantly jump to next screen option. No dialogue trees as you just use the inventory items to prompt conversations.
* Voice acting is of a high quality throughout.
Con
* It is pretty linear and the ending seemed a bit rushed (and a bit cryptic)
* The tile puzzle will frustrate a lot of people and is the hardest puzzle in the game (took me about 40 mins of farting about with them to get it right)
It probably helped that the UK release has a printed manual (the US release is pdf on the disc). Although not essential the manual does a great job of telling you a bit about the main cast and the various alien races in the game in a couple of pages.
Overall this is probably the most fun i've had in adventure games in years. I loved every minute of it and shot straight into my top 10 adventure games of all time.
9/10
Dear Diary, My teenage angst bullsh*t now has a bodycount.
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