After spending a week or so away from the game after finishing it, I feel like writing up my opinions of the game now. The summary: I enjoyed it a lot, though I'm not in any hurry to play it again.
The game built a fun world with diverse regions that had color and character to them and actually felt …
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After spending a week or so away from the game after finishing it, I feel like writing up my opinions of the game now. The summary: I enjoyed it a lot, though I'm not in any hurry to play it again.
The game built a fun world with diverse regions that had color and character to them and actually felt like distant areas. Populated areas had enough unique characters to lend credibility to their populations. The engine allowed for more organic terrain than games of its time. It really worked for a third-person action/adventure game.
The software renderer made the game difficult to run well on the computers of its day and the max supported resolution of 512x384 bears that out. Modern computers can support more and there is an unofficial patch to set higher resolutions, but it seems to make the game less stable. Disappointing that the game engine wasn't future-proofed to support arbitrary higher resolutions to give modern computers a chance to make it shine. Not surprising that widescreen and multi-threading aren't supported, though, given the technology of the time.
The controls took some getting used to, especially having a single context-sensitive action button and an aim button that changed the context of the action button to attack. I didn't have problems with it for long, but it spent several early fights jumping at enemies instead of shooting them. On the other hand, I never accidentally drew on and shot a person I was trying to talk to, so the controls have that working for them. Diving and climbing in water wasn't intuitive at first, but worked. The weapons themselves were also a bit clunky and the menu and inventory system felt like it was designed for a joystick or gamepad, where using my mouse would have been much more intuitive.
Speaking of inventory, I finally had to resort to reading the manual and a FAQ to figure out what some of my own equipment even was and how to use it. It seems weird that I was recognizing and becoming familiar with in-game people, places, local fauna, and native tools, all from in-game conversations, before learning how my different guns worked and why I had three or four wrench-looking things all named differently. It makes narrative sense that the natives knew nothing of most of it, but since there was an in-game journal embedded in my HUD, it would have made sense for it to have a section describing stuff that the character would have already been familiar with before starting the mission.
The game save system was interesting, where saving the game required equipping and using an item and made you vulnerable for a few seconds. It did a good job of minimizing save scumming, but I wished there was a quicker way to save when in safe(r) areas, or a checkpoint system or something. Saving quickly became a chore, and there were several cases where I hadn't saved often enough.
The story and acting were good with a few exceptions. I wished the ending had at least teased what came next. It did provide closure for the adventure, but I've seen some test footage of a cancelled sequel, and how they planned to get from here to there could have been an interesting story all its own. I wished we'd seen the setup for that. Still, this may have been an artistic decision at the time (who knows if they planned to have a sequel when the ending was decided on).
There were a few bugs, including a required jump that became nearly impossible on modern systems (due to geometry being just beyond what it should have been). At one point, I suffered several crashes in one area for no discernable reason, though that problem seemed to go away on its own. I also had several points where climbing the stairs out of water was finicky, and several times where I accidentally climbed up a chunk of something that really shouldn't have been climbable. Only the impossible jump was a game-breaker, though, and looking that up online gave me a workaround that worked.
If the sequel had been finished and released, I would be severely tempted to go find and play it now. Since there isn't, I'm happy to move onto something else now. I know I missed a number of side quests, but I don't feel any need to go back and complete those, or to start my adventure over. That may change over time, of course, when the details of this run fade.
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