As I promised several times in my other thread, I finally finished the game and I'm quite ready to review it. I'll cover my AG background: I'm a huge MI fan (who isn't?
), I like horror AGs, the Broken Sword series, Sam & Max etc but I'm also quite fond of underdogs like Blackstone Chronicles or Dragonstone. I've even come to like the Myst series after years of hatred. Anyway, here it goes. It does contain some minor spoilers, so read carefully if you're absolutely bound of buying it no matter what. I'm gonna keep it rather short, don't worry.
Martyn Mystére is an italian game, done by Artematica, the same italian company that brought us the rather horrible Druuna - Morbus Gravis. It seems like the idea of a Martin game had been around for years, Simulmondo was the first SH presented with the project, but they were quite busy with Dylan Dog at the time and could not do it. So after years of waiting, Artematica became interested in the project, Alfredo Castelli (author of the comic book) gave the ok... and so it went. The story is quite adherent to the original Operation Dorian Grey comic book: our dear Martin becomes involved in a murder; Professor Eulemberg was killed, he was researching life after death and particularly the Mayas' way of 'transferring the soul to another body'. I'm not gonna spoil anything more than that, but let's say the plot was quite interesting, although it suffered from the rather common 'everything in a dialogue' fault. But I don't think it was that bad, I enjoyed it.
As I said in my other thread, the screenshots I saw on various magazines looked like 'Broken sword 3', but that was not the case. First of all, the game is plain 2d backgrounds with 3d characters, everything NOT graphically accelerated. So while the bgs do look very good (although some could have enjoyed a bit more animation), the characters are grainy and do not look beautiful. But they do not look bad either, so I found graphics to be very good, I would say even better than Black Mirror.
I'm not gonna comment that much about the voices, since they're obviously gonna be changed in the english version, but they were pretty decent. Music was, generally, quite good but I would have appreciated it more if it was top notch all the time. I don't like when some tracks sound excellent (like in the museum) and some are a 20 secs looped affair.
So, I'll make my first point right here: this is a budget game. You can't escape the truth, it definitely looks that way, so DO NOT expect top notch quality in any department and do not expect the game to be flawless.
That brings me to the 'puzzle' department, and they depressed me quite a bit. I mean, not because of the puzzles themselves, but because most of the time you're left with knowing exactly what to do but having no clue as how to accomplish it and no clues lying around. Example: you find a rather old clock, you think 'I gotta give this to a man in exchange for a key', and this man says' nah, that thing does not interest me', and so you think you're wrong right? Nope, you just gotta attach a necklace to it, and make it look more 'expensive', then the guy accepts it. And there are no clues to this riddle, I really can't see why not. So, puzzles are never that difficult, but you're left completely on your own as to what to do. Some people may like it, but I'm sure most of you don't, and that is my biggest complain with the game. I mean, not every puzzles is clueless, but some really require dumb solutions that you can figure out in 20 secs, and you're not happy at all when you do figure 'em out.
So I must say I was quite unhappy with Martin, being a game graphically and musically good but with poor riddles. Then the last part of the game came, and I really found myself enjoying it quite a bit, and that is one of the main reasons I'm recommending people to buy it, while knowing of course what you're bound to encounter sooner or later.
Are there any bugs? Yup, not show stopping ones, but you can easily see people walking through walls or not facing the person you're speaking to.
Don't let all this get you down however, if the price is bound to stay fixed (here it costs 20 euros/25 dollars) I'd say is quite a nice catch for any Broken Sword fan or anyone who read the comic book. It's not very long either, so I also recommend not using walkthroughs every five minutes.
All in all, I'd give it a 7 out of 10.
Lower the vote if the game costs more than 20 euros/25 dollars/12 GBP.
