szcaxJourneyman
Posts : 935
Joined: 12 OCT 2002
Status : Online | Moving on to gameplay...
The game is divided up into several locations throughout England which come available to you as your need to visit them arises. Upon exiting a location, you can select your next destination via a map (ala Gabriel Knight 1). One minor gripe - the map scrolls to cover s large area, but most of the locations are all jumbled together in the upper left quadrant. Inside a location, there are hotspots you can click on for Holmes to look at the item or talk to the person. A right mouse button click will provide you with the full list of available actions associated with the hotspot. Your inventory is represented by a scrolling list of icons. Its such a shame that you have to scroll a heck of a lot, since you can only see 8 items at a time and you can never get rid of those pesky items that you don't want any more. To add insult to injury, you can pick up numerous useless items, including every goshdarn piece of paper you ever lay your fingers on, even if it just a message that says "Analysis complete. Traces of Ammonium Nitrate. May have a name. -Dewar." Ugh.
The puzzles in the game are nothing new, consisting mostly of looking at everything and talking to everybody about everything. I'm not kidding about looking at everything - you need to look at the carpets, the tables, the doors, even the characters themselves. I guess this is acceptable because of the detective theme of the game of the game, but it's just taken too far. Even though you're treated to beautiful 19th century descriptions every time you look at things, it gets old surprisingly fast. The inventory puzzles aren't terrible, but they're certainly nothing to get excited about. The puzzles also lean towards the easy side, mostly because you're given magnanamous hints inside the game and from Watson. Despite what a lot of TLFoSH:CotRT reviewers say, this isn't an altogether bad thing. Yes, it moves like you're reading a book, but this is essential to this type of game. It's important that the players gets swept up in the mystery, rather than wander around wondering how to wake up the blacksmith so he can copy the key to the clown's room so you can steal his hat to disguise yourself to get into the castle. One quick warning before I move on: there is <gasp> an ACTION SEQUENCE in the game. Wait! Don't stop reading! Come back! This particular (here come those evil words again) ACTION SEQUENCE, in which you must beat a person in darts in order to get information, fits well into the storyline and shouldn't pose a problem to anyone, despite how reflex deprived you are.
The graphics of the game are beautiful, while the sounds are passable. The rooms are well-painted 2d inside which the video-captured characters realistically move. Traveling between locations, you're treated to photographs of 19th century england as you wait for the location to load. A nice touch. However, some of the animations really irk me. They are unskippable, which is unfortunate because you have to view some of them ad nauseum. The sounds are acceptable. Not much to say about them, really.
The game takes itself very seriously. There's only one scene (part of the ending video clip) that's sort of cheesy. On a similar note, the ending is very satisfying, but also leaves a sequel up for grabs.
So grab this game if you can, especially if you liked the first in the series. If you feel like being a cheap illegal immoral scum of a loser, go ahead and download it from the underdogs. A lot of you probably already have. But you miss a whole lot without the voice acting. Imagine playing Full Throttle without the clipscenes. You could do it, but you'd be a fool to do so. Overall, I'd say the game gets a B+ for it's excellent story and immersive environment, brought down just for every time I had to look at a wlkthrough because I failed to look at a seemingly innocent hotspot.
What do y'all think?
Black holes are where God divided by zero
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