QFingers
84,756
TA Score for this game: 1,500
Posted on 09 January 11 at 18:55 |
This review has 29 positive votes and 6 negative votes. Please log in to vote. |
Well, I just finished this game and disliked it so much I figured I should write something. I only played this game as a challenge from my friend who loves garbage games, so I wasn't expecting much...
Story:
With the caveat that I've never read the book(s?) or watched the movie, the story is dumb. It didn't make any sense until 3 or 4 levels deep. The first level, I didn't understand why there were so many voices talking. Then I realized the bear talks. After that I thought Lyra was just schizophrenic but as it turns out it is the weasel/ermine that talks. It takes a number of levels to actually understand what is happening, but I'm still not sure I even know why. Even with the cinematics sprinkled in, it feels like it just jumps around so much, it’s barely coherent.
Gameplay:
The gameplay is garbage. Far too much wandering around talking to people. It feels like it could have been one of those "point and clicks" from the 90's. That stuff was only fun for a little while and this game is no exception. There are also a number of mini games while "deceiving" people. Note the quotes. Lyra doesn't really lie much, but what she does do is manipulate. Either way, most of the adults she talks to are either really dumb or just very weak willed. The games themselves are initially imaginative but then become derivative. It’s all "get the green avoid the red". They aren't very balanced either. Some games, two slip ups and you are screwed, other games you can win after a number of failures.
Here is a suggestion that could have slightly improved this: don't have the dialog stop while the mini game goes on. Have it continue as you play and if you start to suck, Lyra starts to stutter and make up something stupid. This would have made it a little more interesting.
The wandering around feels broken too. After you pick up a little momentum Lyra does that slide thing as if she was an Olympic skier coming down a black diamond. Even trying to walk up to someone to talk to them was made difficult by this. You had to be in the EXACT spot, which meant a lot of fidgeting around. This gets pretty irritating fast, especially with the AWFUL camera. There is NO camera control, so in some (many) instances you are running toward the camera and there is literally 1 ft in front of Lyra that you can actually see. Many of the running and jumping puzzles are 10 times more difficult because you can't move the camera. Jump, Fall, Jump, Fall, Jump, Fall then finally you figure out you are completely on the wrong plane.
The only "game" part of this game was riding on the bear killing stuff; and by “killing” I “mean turning to dust”. Too bad this was pretty weak, too. Just mash 'X'. Very rarely I had to use 'A' to block. The witch’s AI was bad too. For the ones you aren't required to kill, although they were incredibly difficult to hit, you could just walk past them. They would shoot at you but if you got by, they wouldn't turn around to pursue.
Graphics:
Awful. Naturally a result of being released for so many consoles, it was probably created on the lowest common denominator (Wii, PS2), then ported over to Xbox360 and the like. The textures are pretty low, and the people look pretty bland. The "cinematic" cutscenes are straight from the movie, but some of them are ridiculously compressed. It reminds me of the Sega CD games with its "Full Motion Video." Nothing is impressive in the least, and it’s not even on par with the 360's release games.
Issues:
I encountered a number of incredibly frustrating "features" in my agonizing 20 hrs:
1) No pause during deception game and dialog
- wtf? Was this too hard to implement or what? Not a huge deal, except some of the games are a number of questions long, and I mistakenly had some bad food that night. The inability to pause was an incredible risk to my pants.
2) No pause during alethiomiter
- See above. Since you can use the alethiomiter during normal game play, I figured that it is a separate issue, especially when the black needle spins around 45 times before landing on a symbol... GD!
3) Glitches occur when skipping cut-scenes too quickly
- The first place I found this was on my 2nd go around in the first level. After I knocked the marbles down and picked them up, nothing happened. I couldn't use the window to leave and nothing would interact other than the pictures on the wall. The second place was in the level of Bear-Prison. After I gave the prisoner his locket, nothing would interact again, and nothing would trigger the next part. I think these glitches happened because as the dialog was going on I was mashing on the A button to end it as quickly as possible. This probably didn't allow the next trigger to be activated/initialized/turned on or whatever. Either way, a giant hassle.
4) "Throwing" X and Y axis are different speeds
- When you have to throw books, rocks, snowballs, whatever, moving the cursor left and right is at a completely different speed than moving it up and down. This seems like a simple oversight that could have been an easy fix during testing.
5) Crappy video encoding
- One of the complaints I have regarding the movie cut scenes is that some of them look like crap. After I finished the game I went to delete the install, and it was only 5.7 GB. Considering a dual layer DVD is about 9GB, they could have just not compressed those videos as much. Is it really that hard? While I'm on this topic, why is the sound SO QUIET during the cinematics? If I didn't have subtitles turned on, I wouldn't have known what anyone was saying.
6) Voices
- When talking to the NPCs the voices are very inconsistent in terms of pitch and tone and don't sound very convincing. In addition, on the Gyptian boat above the engine room where the guy has his cat stuck in the ropes, if you talk to him a number of times, the voice suddenly becomes SOMEONE ELSE. It's a completely different voice!
7) Save points
- OMG! This is the one that pissed me off the most. In my 2nd play thru while trying to pick up the last 8 symbols for full completion, I would get the symbol, wait for the dialog box to go away, then quit out. When I thought I got the last symbol, no achievement popped up, wtf. I checked the journal, and it turns out that the last couple symbols were still "missing". What you have to actually do is keep playing until you get the "CHECKPOINT" dialog box. When you first start the game, it tells you something about "this game has an auto-save. Do not remove your storage device...", so WHY wouldn't it auto-save after getting a collectible? Seems like every other game I've played has this function now.
Bottom Line:
Straight trash.
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