Customer Reviews

The Secret Files: Tunguska

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

It was a GREAT story with well-done graphics and scenery BUT (and these are big buts for me) there were two things about this game that annoyed me.

The dialogue was bad and the voice acting worse. If I understand it right, English wasn't this game's first language but it should've been the responsibility of the English speakers to get the tone right. The voice actors? Well, I don't know whether to blame them or again the script writers.

And for the puzzles, some of them just made no logical sense and I had to go to a hints site.

I did like this game a lot and I look forward to the sequel. Hopefully, they will work on improving the script and the actors.

If you can tolerate weak dialogue and bad acting...I recommend this game. The story and graphics are GREAT!!

In "Tunguska" You and a Professor work together to solve a mystery surrounding the mysterious explosion that happened in 1908 in Russia & the possible relation between this and the top-secret scientific work being done today.

Some locals believe that a UFO exploded there while others believe a comet collided with the Earth.

This game has several interesting features compared to other adventure games. First you can have the computer high light for you all active objects in a given area to eliminate pixel huunting. Second the game has a auto save feature that makes saving the game a snap.

Although I thought the graphics were excellent, there was some very slight clipping noticed once or twice in the game.

Overall, I really liked playing "Tunguska" - the game has great voice acting and the humour made me laugh more than once.

Highly recommended game for those Syberia fans out there.

First of all, let me say that Tunguska was similar to The Longest Journey in that you play the role of a cute and curvaceous spunky female by the name of Nina. While paying a visit to her scientist father in Germany, Nina discovers that his apartment has been ransacked, and he's nowhere to be found! She soon meets one of her father's co-workers and asks for his assistance as they set out on a world-wide mission in search of the girl's father. There are plenty of colorful characters to chat with along the way and more than enough puzzles to occupy your time. Who doesn't love a good mind boggler? There's plenty of them in this game...trust me.

Nina's travels will take her to Germany, Russia, China, Ireland, and even the Antarctic. The graphics of each location were superbly rendered, and the music and sound effects were certainly sufficient to add to the realism of the game. If you have a high-end graphics card, I would recommend taking advantage of the "4x anti-aliasing" option under the "Options" heading in order to guarantee the sweetest graphics you can display on your monitor.

Overall, this was a very entertaining game with a great storyline. You'll have to do some wild and unthinkable things with the items in your inventory to solve most of the puzzles, but you'll certainly be patting yourself on the back after solving a few of the more trickier puzzles. If you can get over some of the less than stellar acting performances by American "actors" translating German word-for-word into spoken English (and subtitled in English), I think you'll really enjoy the fast paced and intriquing storyline. I can hardly wait for this game's sequel which is being designed as we speak (or so I've read).

I enjoy adventure point-and-click games with a little thought behind them (e.g., Grim Fandango). Tunguska fit the bill perfectly. My fiance and I played it together, and the "puzzles" I thought were obscure made perfect sense to him, and vice versa. So I suppose none are truly obscure, it just depends a little on the way you think. I use quotes for "puzzles" because you rarely run into situations where you have to solve an unrelated put-the-chess-pieces-in-the-right-spot kind of puzzle in order to continue. Instead, it's a fairly logical game where the difficulties you solve are all related to the plot. The plot, by the way, has some holes (all computer-game plots do) but was overall entertaining and had some beautiful cutscenes. A lot was put into the scenery and graphics. I'm looking forward to the 2008 release of a related game, and will definitely buy it. Highly rated!

I loved this game! It reminded me a lot of the first Longest Journey game where the main character is a young girl on a mission. The puzzles were fairly simple, which is a plus for me and other gamers, I'm sure, who don't have to be rocket scientists to figure out the puzzles. Great graphics, and storyline, although voice acting could be better. I'm looking forward to the sequel.

First let me say that I am NOT a hard-core adventure game player, so this game may have appealed to me more than someone who has played everything since Grim Fandango and thought the puzzles in Black Dahlia were too easy :)

The pros for me were -

The game looks great, even though I played it on a laptop with average processing power and RAM.

No timed puzzles or any situation where you can die, you can only get horribly 'stuck' wondering what to do next!

The 'help' function (spacebar) which shows all the hotspots in a location, so you always know that you have everything you need in inventory..even if you haven't got a clue what to do with some of them.

Very few 'red herrings', I think there are only a couple of items you pick up which don't have any use

The cons would be -

As mentioned in other reviews, the voice acting grates after a while, I resorted to playing the game subtitles only because you don't actually need to listen to anything in order to progress

The only way to solve some of the puzzles is by combining everything you can in inventory and clicking on anything in the location you can 'use' that item on. Often there is no intuitive logic involved here at all. As an example, in one location you need to get a helmet-shaped chimney cover from the roof of a castle. There is no way to get on to the roof, so you need to knock it off with something. Most people can get that far, HOW you knock the chimney cover off involves going to a totally different location to get a piece of wood which needs to be sawed in a vice using spearheads (obviously), this board is then placed on a footstool next to the chimney (indoors)and a rock which you have been lugging around for no apparent reason is placed on the end of the board in the fireplace,now you have to release a chandelier rom the ceiling which drops onto one end of the board and flips the rock up the chimney, thus releasing the cover(of course! only an idiot couldn't work that out).The only tiny hint you get in the game about this is that an armchair is in the middle of the room, rather than next to the fire, therefore implying that it has been moved for some reason. No-one could guess that solution without a walkthrough.

The ending is annoying, not the game ending itself, which wraps things up pretty well, but the 'extras' that appear after the final cutscene. These totally spoil the whole atmosphere of the game with their horribly forced attempts to be funny, although some people love them so your mileage may vary.

Apparently the original game ending was pants, so I would recommend patching the game to version 1.02 before playing. I wouldn't give it 5 stars because of the annoying voice acting and because it's VERY linear, there is absolutely no replay value here at all.

Overall, I really enjoyed this game because of the lack of pressure to do anything within a certain time limit, and because the puzzles(with a few exceptions like the one described) don't ruin the flow of the plot by taking so long to solve. I am really looking forward to the sequel, due out early in 2008.

This game was a good effort. It had a decent story line and characters that you could have felt for, but didn't mostly because the voice acting was so HORRENDOUS! The main character Nina sounds like, you know, one of those, like, you know, annoying stereotypical teenagers, who, like, are such total airheads. I know this games is labeled for teens, but do we have to treat them like idiots? I can't imagine a teen not rolling their eyes at this game because it became ridiculous. Also, the lines are very bad. Now I understand this game was translated, but who did the voicing? Inmates at an insane asylum? If I were reading some of these lines, I would have said something about the form or the very bad choice of certain words, just so my name wouldn't be associated with a bad production. Still, some bad lines are forgivable. Oh, and there is some profanity. Not much (mostly at the end), just the excrement one, but I found it's use jarring and a bit disturbing given the overall atmosphere of the game (no doubt some Hollywood worshiper wanting to make this seem "more real and gritty")

The problems in this game were also a point of annoyance. About half made some kind of sense, the rest were just trial and error or a quick read through a walk through. This made it very annoying to play, as I would find myself stopping to check a walk through because the answer was so improbable (or impossible) that I just couldn't figure it out. I'm talking some serious stretching of logic, if not outright silliness.Often the main character is standing in front of a smaller hot spot you need to solve a puzzle, so you have to move her over, then click again on the tiny specific hot spot. I also had trouble identifying these smaller hot spots in a puzzle (ex. you could click on a door and the keyhole) & getting the clicks placed just right so I could activate it.

As for the story itself, it had a lot of potential, but seemed to have fallen short. I stopped being curious about halfway through, but that could have been because I was so annoyed by the main character's voice & frustrated by the puzzles (which were mostly stupid). About the only time I enjoyed myself was when I could play as the secondary character & I attribute that to his voice, which wasn't annoying and did have some ability to convey some emotion.

Overall, I can't really recommend this game unless you are immune to the annoying voice. I got this in that Adventure Pack that comes with 5 games, and that's the only way I would buy this one. It's not worth wasting $10. There is supposed to be a sequel and if they learn from the last & correct the major blunders, then I would happily try it, which is why I've given this one 3 stars instead of 2.

This is an excellent, old fashioned adventure game, with likable characters, interesting story and good puzzles.

The only downside is the bad English translation and voice acting (there are worse, such as the one of Keepsake, but it is by no means good), which severely tarnishes this otherwise splendid game. It was originally produced in German and if you have even a basic knowledge of German, I strongly recommend to get an imported version (which I did after hearing the first few sentences of Nina in English). In German, the writing is excellent and the cast is brilliant: for instance, Nina has the German dubing-voice of Angelina Jolie, and Max has the one of Mark Wahlberg. Other actors employed lend their voices usually to A-list actors such as Orlando Bloom, Christian Slater, Jonny Depp, Tom Hanks, Roger Moore, Kurt Russell, Steven Seagal, Antonio Banderas and even Lisa and Homer Simpson. Dubbing is common in Germany, and these folks have years of experience that you can hear.

I give the game 5/5 for the German version, but only 4/5 for the English one.

The Secret Files: Tunguska is a great game. My younger brother and I played it together and had a blast. Other reviewers have complained about the voice acting, but when that is the main problem with a game, I'd say it's still pretty good. It's fun to play with another person so you can make fun of some of the ridiculous things the characters say. The graphics are very good and overall it's quite entertaining.

The only thing that frustrated me was the often illogical MacGyver-type things you had to do. The game requires you to use objects in creative ways or to combine several items to make new ones. I thought this was a very interesting aspect of the program, but also a little annoying. Sometimes you had to do absurd things that no one would ever think of on their own. We ended up either trying to combine every one of our items, using every item on everything in a room, or "cheating" and looking at the walkthrough. There was also a bug that prevented us from picking up a rat at one point in the game (which is necessary to continue), but I just downloaded a patch from the website and it was fine. Those were my only complaints.

We often play the Nancy Drew series even though it is a bit simplistic and irritating. Tunguska is much better than the ND games and the story is much more mature. I recommend this game to anyone who enjoys adventure or mystery games and suggest playing it with a friend!

I was surprised that this game played as badly as it did. Mostly illogical inventory puzzles that required putting objects together in ways that you would never think of without a walk-through. The game, while visually appealing, was somehow not gripping or motivating. It just wasn't challenging, logical, or enjoyable to play.