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36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Right on the money., January 7, 2004
What can we say? My wife and I love puzzles! Some of our favorite adventure games have been absolutely packed with puzzles: Riven, Rhem, Schizm (the first Mysterious Journey) and Reah (the hard-to-find precursor to Schizm). We have just finished Mysterious Journey II - Chameleon, and I am glad to report that this game has puzzles in spades!We have also recently completed two other new adventure games, Uru - Ages of Myst and Journey to the Center of the Earth. In our minds, Chameleon is the best bang for the buck because it has about the same graphical *wow* as Uru, and much more logical and seamless puzzles than both Uru and Journey (check out our reviews of these other two games for more info). Obviously, a lot of comparisons can be made between this game and either its predecessor, Schizm, or its contemporary competition, Uru. In our review of Schizm, the biggest faults we gave it were that the live-acting was excruciatingly awful and it had a couple of really stinker (illogical, lateral) puzzles. However, Schizm made up for this by taking its players on an absolutely drop-dead gorgeous journey. The pre-rendered graphics of the DVD version of the game were some of the most awe-inspiring images ever put into a video game of any kind up to that point. For Chameleon, since the graphics are now constantly rendered in real time just like Uru, the level of details and lushness of the scenery has diminished just a skosh, but they are still drop-dead gorgeous. It only lacks the sheer immenseness of Uru. As a plus, the awful live acting of the Schizm has been replaced with 3D-rendered characters and more professional-sounding voice actors (although one female character near the end of the game was still painfully irritating - probably a girlfriend of one of the developers). But, you only see and hear the characters during the 3rd-person cutscenes while the rest of the game is played in the much more immersive 1st-person mode. As for the puzzles, they were some of the best we've played in quite a while. They weren't as interconnected as in some games (Riven and Rhem come to mind), but they were extremely varied in difficulty and always seamlessly integrated into the environments of the game. And, boy, were they fair puzzles, as well! Despite their difficulty at times, we only needed to get ONE hint during the entire game (on a particular puzzle that requires you to make a pretty illogical leap to come up with the solution). For all of the others, we were able to just buckle down and noodle out the answers on our own. People who do not like to work with alternate-base numbering systems or pattern observation should NOT get this game. It will frustrate you to no end. Just a couple of irritations (beyond the girl's voice). The game does not come with separate volume controls for speech, music and effects, so sometimes the background noises drowned out the critical conversations. Fortunately, they added the extremely helpful option of reading the game's transcript so you can go back and read what you missed. The music was very good but quite repetitive (hence the need for a separate control). Also, more than just a couple of the transport cutscenes were flat out missing. We were looking forward to riding some of the conveyances in the game (chairlift type devices) only to have it fade to black and then fade back in at the new location. Couldn't they have squeezed in a few more videos on the already beefy 3-CD game? Finally, these guys still cannot come up with a decent ending to their games. Like Reah and Schizm, the ending to Chameleon is pretty anti-climactic (although, as a whole, the story of the game was quite improved). In summary, we really enjoyed this episode and hope they continue to make many more Mysterious Journeys. If, like us, you were disappointed in the bloat (and puzzle cop-outs) of Uru, give this one a look.
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37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Better than MJ 1 by a long shot, February 9, 2004
In the opening movie of Mysterious Journey 2, you wake up on a space station. A recorded message informs you that you have been in cryogenic sleep for 200-odd years as punishment for "betraying your planet." Apparently you were involved in some kind of war that, 2 centuries before, all but wiped out the planet (Sarpedon) and everyone on it. Furthermore, the recording informs you, the space station will fall out of orbit in a number of days and waking you up to experience this event is also part of your punishment. But before the recording can tell you anything else, an energy surge destroys it and you are left....alone?MJ 2 is a 1st person game with numerous 3rd person cutscenes as you progress. Let's get the tech out of the way: this game requires a computer no more than a year old or so, with a good video card. The game (on three discs) fully installs to the tune of several gigs of hard drive space. Once installed, is does not need any disc inserted to run--a plus, in my book. As you might expect from the requirements, MJ 2 is graphically stunning. There's lots of subtle animation, from the movement of water, to trees swaying in he breeze, to insects fluttering around lamps: in every location, something is moving. The character rendering is also quite good, although character movement in the cutscenes is a little jerky. The sound, however, is a little weak. Music consists of the same tape loops repeated over and over again, with no variation between locations, and f/x mainly consists of blowing wind and mechanical humming. The voice acting was decent, but in several places the f/x drowns out the dialog. There is no separate volume controls for dialog and f/x, nor are there any subtitles. So there were places where I really couldn't hear what was being said. You can get a dialog transcript from the main menu, but there were inexplicable gaps in that transcript. Fortunately, you didn't really need the dialog to play the game, but I still found it annoying. You can navigate either with the keyboard or the mouse or both. Movement is absolutely unrestricted, which was nice. There were only 3 mouse cursors to worry about: the general navigation cursor, the "activity here" cursor, and the warp cursor, which took you between locations. New locations took several seconds to load, but movement within a location was smooth and fast. Though there is a story behind your actions, essentially MJ2 is a puzzle-heavy game. Puzzles lead to new locations, which lead to more puzzles and so on. I found that most of the puzzles were on the easy to medium-hard side. When I got stuck, it was more likely that I was making the puzzle more complicated than it really was; thinking in simpler terms often led to a solution. Many of the puzzles are math-based, so if you don't have a mathematical mind, you might not like this game. Attention to details of the environment is a must, as is note-taking. There are a few inventory puzzles, but you generally used your inventory immediately, in the location in which you found it. There are no timed puzzles and you can't die, but there are a few places where you can get backed into a corner, so saving before and after each puzzle is essential. There are an unlimited number of save slots available to accomodate this, plus the game auto-saves at each new location. The one thing that really bothered me about this game was that about half the time, completing a puzzle led to an area where nothing at all happened except that you got to look at some scenery. So you might spend an hour trying to get into a room and only three seconds in there, which made me wonder why I had bothered. I think the puzzles could have been integrated into the game better. As it was, the plot seemed almost an afterthought, stuck in to make an adventure out of what was mainly a series of puzzles for puzzles' sake. I took about 30 hours to complete MJ 2 at the rate of 1 or 2 puzzles a night; it was not a game that absorbed or inspired me to keep playing for hours and hours on end. I liked it better than MJ1--it was far better constructed and far more comprehensible. If you like puzzles you'll probably like this game. If you're looking for a complex story and character interaction, probably not so much.
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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Immersive, beautiful, and challenging!, March 24, 2004
This is probably the second best adventure game I've ever played (the best one being Riven). The graphics were incredible, even running low detail on an Athlon XP 1700. I had the bare minimum graphics card (hardware TnL w/64 MB RAM) so some of the more expansive areas rendered VERY slowly, but most of the game ran at a very comfortable frame rate. (If you've got a top-rate video card, this game will give you a visual feast!) The sound effects are also very immersive and are impressively detailed whether you've just got stereo speakers or a full 5.1 surround sound setup.All the technical detail in the world is just so much eye and ear candy if the gameplay isn't up to par, and MJ2 delivers logical puzzle-style gameplay in spades! As others have mentioned, the puzzles are very well integrated into the game, and while there were a few that I looked at and thought, "It wouldn't be set up like this in reality," most were very carefully placed and believably integrated into the game. The difficulty was just right, I think, with a good variety of puzzles including pattern recognition, alternate number systems, and integrational thinking, along with one or two movement-based puzzles made possible by your ability to move freely in real time (a nice addition, in my opinion). The voice acting was generally much better than in Schizm (with one notable exception near the end), but the character animation was a bit stilted (most of the characters moved like they had arthritis). The storyline was very engaging and interesting and helped move you along in the game. Also, it was very rare to find yourself in a place wondering, "What do I do/Where do I go now?" Usually, there was some clue in the last cutscene that would suggest a course of action or someplace that you hadn't gone yet that would provide a new area to explore or a puzzle to solve. The lack of subtitles was more than made up for by the inclusion of a transcript that you could review (without which I'd have had to get a cheat to solve the last puzzle) at any time throughout the game. There were inexplicable gaps in it, but they were not critical. The ending, while not spectacular, was still satisfying (and MUCH better than the one in Schizm!). Overall, I highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys good, logical puzzles wrapped up in a gorgeous game. The only caveats I would offer are: 1. make sure your computer exceeds the minimum requirements in most areas (if you can invest in a good video card, DO IT!), and 2. make sure you understand and enjoy working with alternate base numbering systems (e.g. base-2, base-4, etc.). Here's looking forward to more Mysterious Journeys!
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