Customer Reviews

Beneath A Steel Sky

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This game is a real classic
i remeber watch my brother playing this game.
Good times indeed.

i played this game for myself just a 2 months ago, still a great game worth the time and the money :)

Joakim Fredheim
Norway

The ScummVM project lets you play classic point-and-click adventure games on modern operating systems using the original data files for each game. In most cases you need to provide the data files (from a purchased copy) yourself, but the designers of Beneath a Steel Sky have kindly released their game to ScummVM for free. That means: you can try out this seminal cyberpunk title FREE OF CHARGE and on a variety of operating systems. I decided to give this one a shot and see what it was all about, since I wasn't out anything to look into it.

The problem I have with this game is that it has a hard time finding its style and sticking to it. Is it a comic-book game? Not really, since there are only a very few cutscenes, and the rest is just like any other point-and-click adventure. Is it a gritty cyberpunk dystopia set in a realistic and frightening future? Well, not quite... despite the decaying city and forays into cyberspace, every character makes cheap puns and quotes television shows, and so the player can't take the setting seriously. What about a humorous adventure, like the Space Quest series? No, that doesn't fit either, since there are parts obviously meant to be taken seriously.

The result is a mishmash of genres, styles, pop-culture references, and storyline that tries to do too much and doesn't deliver well on any. Most everything is over-acted, laden with cheesy dialogue, narrowly escaped by wacky hijinks, or otherwise impossible to take seriously. If you can get with the tone, you'll absolutely love the game. I couldn't and it bugged me to no end. And the music is pretty awful (except the jukebox tunes...)

There are some good points, though. The graphics are excellent - nicely drawn and well-animated. Though I didn't care much for the script, I appreciated the speech version of the game - it really brought the characters to life. The cyberspace puzzles were pretty interesting (easy though). I only had very minor troubles with the interface. And, goofy quips aside, the story was actually a very interesting tale of computers, overbearing caste systems, and government overlords.

I recommend this one only to adventure game regulars looking for another game to try. As a cyberpunk fan, I was disappointed with the lighthearted look at an Orwell nightmare. At least it's free now, and ScummVM makes it easy to try it out yourself without too much effort.