Πρόσφατες κριτικές από τον DocCovington

I have only started this game but am already in love with it: the atmosphere, the music, the graphics, the characters. So many wonderful scenarios, underlined by a beautiful orchestral soundtrack. Did I mention the sky is in motion? Yep. This game is eye, ear and mind candy.

On the technical side of things, the UI is really intelligent! How you unlock things in order to proceed through the story is truly encouraging your investigative nature. You never feel stuck and always get excited when you make a new discovery.

Honorable mention: achievements are kept to the basics, which takes that particular pressure off you so you can focus on the actual story and gameplay and the mystery aspect of the game.

A true gem in the HO genre. Artifex Mundi has had quite a few mediocre, rather sloppily developed releases, but I suppose those are necessary to finance the bigger projects -- like this one.

Good graphics, nice puzzles, the overall story is fun, but the characters are completely dull. Rarely been this little "emotionally involved" in an Artifex Mundi HO game than I was in this one.

Okay to buy at a discount, but not at full prize. Artifex Mundi has much more compelling releases that are must-haves. Like the recently released third installment of their Grim Legends series, for instance.

Bought the retail version on release. Still a great game: well written and designed sequel, worthy of its predecessor! Continues the scary atmosphere and gripping story. A must-buy!

Terrible port from console to PC. Almost unplayable with keyboard and mouse. Also, terrible graphics effects and lousy story-telling.

I bought the retail back in 2005 on release.

Still one of the best shooters of all time! Tense atmosphere, quite scary, gripping story, goose bump guarantee. Many newer games of the genre could learn from it.

(Too bad part 3 was such a lousy game and a terrible port from console to PC.)

On the positive side, this game's graphics are excellent compared to most other games of the genre. And perhaps that's part of the problem, for the hidden object scenes didn't pose any challenge for you could easily spot each object quickly.

The biggest bummer, however, was that this game is too linear. You never have to guess what to do next as one step leads to other, making it far too easy to proceed. There is no excitement in that as there was none in the puzzles, either.

And don't get me started on the lame story.

Definitely one of the most boring HO games out there.

Having played almost all of Artifex Mundi's games, I have to say that this one was extremely boring. It has a decent engine and beautiful graphics, but it is too easy.

The puzzles weren't challenging and you didn't have any difficult achievements. You could finish everything in Expert Mode within a few hours without having to consult an online guide even once.

Maybe it's because it was developed by a different studio and only published by Artifex Mundi, I don't know. But I have played other games of theirs which were a dozen times more challenging and more fun (also story-wise).

Bought it twice, the second time I had hoped Steam would already have patched it, but no such luck. Never could get it to run on my OS (Windows 7 Professional 64-bit), so had to ask for a refund twice.

I did buy the game after the free weekend for only two reasons:

1. It's D&D, it's the Forgotten Realms, it looks better than NWN2.
   
2. I am already fond of my character and want to see how the story plays out.

At first, I was not so convinced. As a person who tries not to be biased (and whose favorite genre game of all time is Dragon Age: Origin, a CRPG tweaked to mere perfection), I would like to list the pros and cons of this game. You can then decide for yourself whether you want to buy it at full price or rather on sale...

Pros:

• Decent character creation options.
  
• Easy-to-handle user interface.
  
• Almost every element on the screen has tooltips attached to it which quickly help you understand a function or provide you with knowledge and lore.
  
• Excellent voice-acting.
  
• The soundtrack is awesome and fits into the line of D&D games like the Baldur's Gate series.
  
• The game runs flawlessly on my computer on max settings (however, I heard from others that theirs is lagging pretty bad, so maybe the engine does need a couple of tweaks still).
  
• Speaking of the engine, the environment and surroundings look beautiful, even if it's not the highest quality of what 3D games these days can provide, it sure comes close to that.
  
• Great story-telling. The atmosphere of the game is tense and does indeed feel a bit like playing the pen&paper game. You do feel like you are moving through areas created by an ambitious dungeon master.
  
• A vast variety of locations.
  
• The maps are lovely, textures are more than decent, and I love those little details like seeing square paper when you scroll the camera off limits in pause mode.

Cons:

• Let's start with cosmetics, namely the character creation: While you can adjust many things, some things are missing. For once, you cannot adjust height nor body type (slim, heavy etc.). What I was missing a lot more, though, were the following options:
  
  
  • You can't change the characters eyebrows (which is important for a more unique look).
    
    
  • You can't change the nose length (which is also important for a more unique look).
    
    
  • You can't change the width of the face to make it look more narrow or rounder (ditto).
    
    
  • P.S. Why are there so few haircuts to chose from?
  
  
• A huge no-go: Only one save game! I have lost a fortunr due to that fact (long story), you need to deactivate auto-save so something like that won't happen to you, too (for the auto-save overwrites your save game).
  
  
• You cannot look into your companions' inventory nor see their stats when you are in the Adventurer's Camp. That makes it so much harder to distribute loot, look through stuff and decide what you want to keep, what to store in the storage and what to sell immediately to free your inventory and lighten the weight. This is extremely hindering, as you have to "take each character out" to some other location in order to go through their inventory, and with more than three NPCs in your party, that's a lot of work and remembering who is carrying what in the process.
  
  
• Tons of graphical glitches in armor and other wear. My favorites: the bold head the "invisible" Musician's Hat gives you, or the missing parts of the Paladin NPC's legs when applying other footgear than his original one.
  
  
• It's a shame that you are force-stuck in isometric view. Dragon Age: Origin proves how well third person perspective and isometric perspective can be combined in one game: by simply zooming in far enough, you get the feel of a "third-person shooter", by zooming out you get the tactical isometric view which is very useful in combat.
  
  The fact that you are stuck to isometric view all the time in this game (except for the dialogue scenes where the camera zooms in close) takes away a bit of the excitement of the gameplay experience. You can't look close at your character, which you took so much time to create, nor swirl the camera around them.
  
  
• The movement feels awful at first. You have no option to permanently center the camera to your character so that you can move them with WASD. Instead, WASD moves the camera and you have to click on a spot for the character to move there (which can also get annoying as you would get a vocal reaction from them everytime you click somewhere). This is a redundant feature, as in addition you already have two other ways to move the camera: 1) By moving the mouse pointer to the edge of the screen and 2) by holding down the middle mouse button and move the move the mouse.
  
  Even though one grows used to it after a while, it still feels clunky. It would be nice if the developers added an option to center the camera on the character permanently so you can move them with WASD instead of pointing and clicking all the time (which is an "old school CRPG" feature we can really do without in 2015). Adding this option would also help with the movement bug mentioned below in the bugs section.
  
  
• Automated pause: I already limited it to "When a hidden object is discovered", "When an enemy is spotted" and "When a character's health drops low".
  
  Still, the auto-pausing system needs a serious tweak, because everytime I encounter a group of enemies, the game auto-pauses on every single one of them when I get closer, making the approach a spacebar click fest, which annoys the hell out of me. I already spotted all enemies with my eyes, why does the system have to auto-pause on every single one of them?
  
  
• You can't equip your NPC in camp. Everytime you wish to distribute new items, you need to "take them out" some place in order to do so. That is highly impractical and extremely time-consuming, therefore a gets a little frustrating after a while.
  
  
• Bugs (and there are still plenty of them):
  
  
  • There is no way to skip the movies at the start. If you happen to press the mouse button or any key during those intros, the program might freeze on you and you will get a Windows error message that it stopped working.
    
    
  • If you play co-op with one or more friends, it can happen that you get stuck in the dialogue with an NPC without an option to end it. In that case, all you can do is end the program via task manager. Any unsaved progress will be lost for you and your companions.
    
    
  • The movement bug I mentioned earlier: Since you can only move the characters from point A to B by clicking on a spot, and there happen to be obstacles in the way, the character might get stuck and you will have to "help them out". Quite annoying.
  
  
• The dialogues:
  
  
  • Why are not all of them voice-acted?
    
    
  • Why do you have to wait which seems like forever before the "Continue" button appears?
  
  
• I am an old school AD&D nerd, so I know little about the D&D 5th Edition. From what I read, though, many classes (and subraces?) are missing in this game, along with some skills and other things.

I am sure there are more pros and cons to discover while I dig deeper into the game. I will add them later.

Pros:

• game supports 16:9, no stretching etc.
  
• high-res, crystal clear fullscreen graphics (!), which unfortunately is rare in most games of the genre (except for the cutscenes which are low-res, but that's okay)
  
• easy-to-handle user interface that doesn't block big parts of the screen and has a fluent, quick reaction time (which makes mouse movement, clicking, moving objects as well as area transitions extremely comfortable)
  
• cool soundtrack
  
• the puzzles are very well-designed, so are the "monsters" and all the scenes

Cons:

• too short, too easy
  
• any child can solve the tasks, the "Expert Mode" is a joke (things are still indicated and the Hint button makes this a piece of cake); either this game is meant for absolute beginners or the devs couldn't come up with any decent ideas
  
• character animation is very basic, still the characters look nicely designed (unlike those in "Alchemy Mysteries" where they looked like puppets)
  
• the story is completely predictable; there is no suspense, no excitement to look forward to (you can already guess the outcome within the first 10 minutes into the game)

Therefore, I recommend this game only at a discount price and if you have already played through all of Artifex Mundi's great titles.