My take having finished it.
Positives: Good voice acting, soundtrack, characters, and story. Beautiful backgrounds and I personally like the cutscene art style a lot. A few good puzzles in there and a good balance between the story and puzzles.
Negatives: Not horrendously so, but a bit short, guessing the average completion time for most people would be about nine hours. The character models and animations aren't the best as others have said. The "magic" system in the game is a neat concept but they might as well have just saved the player time by doing the trick you pick out by default without having to input the steps yourself because none of those puzzles present a challenge. Most of the puzzles are pretty easy(which could be a positive or negative) but sometimes it's hard to know what you missed in an area, particularly a conversation you might need to have.
Overall, I'd say it's one of the better adventure games to come out in a while, but not on the level of the GK games, and it's somewhat hard to understand why it took so long to make with the shorter length and low budget nature of the game engine. It has a conclusive ending, but feels like the type of game that could have sequels, so hopefully if Jane doesn't go back to Gabriel Knight she'll continue this series hopefully in faster order than the first game.
|
