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37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful, Yet Oddly Tedious, May 6, 2003
_The Omega Stone_ follows directly upon the events of its predecessor, _Riddle of the Sphinx_. In the opening movie your "friend," Sir Gil Blythe Geofferys, tells you that the scrolls you found in the last game make clear that a global catastrophe is coming any day now, but that you can prevent it by finding the six "omega discs" scattered in "mystic sites" across the globe. Sir Gil provides you with passes to all the sites (conveniently, all are being excavated by his research foundation) and a driver to get you from place to place. The rest is up to you.To its credit, there are many things right with TOS. It's a stunning game visually, with beautiful 360-degree graphics. Its video engine runs remarkably smoothly. The background sound f/x are subtle and not too repetitious. The interface is easy to use, with unlimited saves available. You can die, but it usually happens only when you do something incredibly stupid. There are no timed puzzles. Unfortunately, the good things about TOS are not enough to make up for the fact that gameplay is, well, a bore. With no character interaction to liven things up a game really needs lots of intriguing puzzles. But the puzzles in TOS were too few and far between, and mostly too easy. A large part of the game consists of running back and forth through endless tunnels searching for inventory, some of which is hidden in really unlikely places. Too, only about a sixth of the inventory you acquire is ever used for anything and none of it ever disappears, so every time you access inventory you have to scroll through about forty items to find the one you want. In the end I was all too aware that the miles of corridors and the excess inventory were contrived to extend a game that didn't have much to it. I found this irritating. This is a four disc game with a full install option. As the full install takes up 2.7 additional gigs of memory and disc swapping doesn't bother me that much, I skipped it. I found the problem isn't disc swapping, it's disc LOADING. Every time you change discs or locations, or load a game in any way, it takes over five minutes. As there are places i the game where you can't go from pne place to another without going through a third, there were times I sat for twenty minutes or more just waiting to be able to play. I have no idea if the full install solves tis problem because when I tried to re-install it crashed my computer every time, and this despite having more than the recommended system. TOS is pretty glitchy, with numerous hotspots that didn't show up, books that turned into other books halfway through, and important scrolls that were impossible to view, necessitating visits to a cheat site. Using inventory was really slow, making a couple of puzzles extremely tedious. There were items you could zoom in on for no reason, places you could go where nothing happened and places you could see from a distance but never get to. An entire sub-plot never came to anything. All in all, TOS gave an impression of superficial extravagance with little underlying substance. I took about 35 hours to complete the game, but I really could only call about half of that actual "play." After everything, the endgame was stupid, obvious, and too quick, relying on an interminable monologue to wrap things up where I would have liked a better and more complex puzzle. I think we can look forward to another sequel; I hope OMNI can keep the beauty and take a serious look at the quality of the rest of the game. I might give TOS three and a half stars, but all the five star reviews I've seen must have been looking no further than appearances here.
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