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197 of 215 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Terrific, April 22, 2006
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
Six years. Quite a long time to be waiting for a sequel to an adventure game. It is also quite a long time for graphics, hardware and gameplay to change. When the Longest Journey came out, it was heralded by critics as being one of the best adventure games a person could buy. It incorporated a terrific story, wonderful voice work and, at the time, good graphics that helped bring depth to the genre. Now, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey is out, a direct sequel to the events of the first game. Is it everything we could hope for? Well, that depends on what you're looking for.
A lot of reviews out there, including here on amazon.com, have talked about various aspects of the game. The negative points discussed were the easiness of the gameplay, the bulkiness of the controls and the horrible combat. The positives have been over-whelming the terrific, complex and utterly addictive story and plot. So, depending on what you are looking for, you will either really love this game or really dislike it.
AS far as the gameplay is concerned, I tried playing it with a mouse and keyboard but the controls felt wonky to me. I am a console player mostly and because of my lack of affinity with the mouse and keyboard for third person controlled games I spend a good deal of time walking into things and the walls. However, plugging in a controller, all of my complaints went away. I'd recommend trying a controller if you have any problems, as the game seems better suited to it (probably due to the fact it is also an Xbox game).
The difficulty has been lessened from The Longest Journey. One one hand, this is definitely a valid complaint. However, my complaint with the first game was that there were times where the puzzles seemed utterly illogical and were very order-specific. I would spend a long time trying to get something accomplished simply because I didn't do it exactly how the game wanted me to. In that aspect, Dreamfall lessens any frustrations to allow you to enjoy the story more fully. That said, the puzzles do lack the depth of The Longest Journey and adventure games in general. I wish they were a bit more difficult or took a little more brain power to figure out what to do.
The combat is a bit clunky. It is comprised of block, light hit and strong hit. A rock, paper, scissors type gameplay ensues where a strong hit will break through a block, a block defends against a light punch and a light punch can break someone from doing a strong attack. However, the controls are a bit wonky as well, making battles easy but unintuitive. You can also slide to the side, forward and back while blocking. While it's not up to par with fighting games like Dead or Alive, what do you want from an adventure game?
Actually, calling it a game might be stretching it a little. And I don't mean this in a bad way. Playing this game reminds me of another fantastic adventure game called Indigo Prophecy, but without the simon says style gameplay. Here, you will move from place to place, work on puzzles, do some stealth and some clunky fighting. But the gameplay is there to pull you in and create an interactive story. A cinematic story that has you at the center. I like this approach.
Graphically, I think the game is stellar. There've been complaints in this department as well, but I think the game is pretty stunning. While there's no way it could live up to the powerhouse of, say, Oblivion, what is here is terrific. The colors are vibrant and lush, the settings are absolutely beautiful. Casablanca, the starting city, feels like a mix of futuristic landscapes with a traditional Spanish-style living. Add to this the vibrant color scheme and terrific art direction, and I think the game is stunning.
One department no one seems to be complaining about is the sound. From the beautiful music to the very competent voice staff, everything runs well. Some characters are a little lacking, not necessarily in their voices but in the direction. Sometimes it seems as if the voice actors don't know the context of what they are saying and stress words wrongly or don't have the excitement or fear that one would have in their situations. As an example, in the beginning someone is afraid of something (I'm being purposefully vague) and cries "No! No!" but it's almost as if the threat is a mere bother as opposed to a possibly life-altering event. Other times, though, the voice actors are terrific in conveying the emotion.
The game scales really well. While I'm playing it above the recommended specs, there's nary a fault or bug that I've come across. There's no slowdown from what I've seen. It also scales terrifically well to fit your monitor. I've played it on a regular 19" all the way up to a widescreen monitor and it is terrific. The game was made to be played in 16:9 widescreen. Like I said earlier the controllers work terrifically with the game. I am using an Xbox 360 controller and I haven't had a single problem, save that the trigger buttons don't register.
One confusing problem is the constant presence of loading screens. There are a ton of them breaking up cutscenes as well as action. It's a little disappointing. I'm sure part of the problem was to help make it playable on both the Xbox and the PC. But load screens are a normal part of our life now and even the "triple A games" like Half Life 2 utilize them. And the loading screens in Dreamfall, while frequent, aren't long by any means. So, to me, it is a minor nuisance that I completely ignored and only bring it up because of other reviews out there commenting that reviewers aren't bringing it up ;)
All of this is simply the mechanics, though. What lies at the heart of this game, much like The Longest Journey, is a story. A story that is exciting, mysterious and emotional all at the same time. The Longest Journey was, at the time, probably one of the best stories I had seen in a video game. Dreamfall has, in my opinion, blown that story out of the water. People will probably argue this with me, but I think Dreamfall's story is definitely a bit better. It seems more urgent this time around. Partly, this is because of the fact its more of an "action adventure" game as opposed to a point and click game. Whereas in The Longest Journey there were instances where you were chased, you couldn't die. Here, things seem a bit more dire and urgent. The pacing of Dreamfall is also excellent and helps keep you moving from point to point. Ragnar Tornquist has a much better control of the story and spins a yarn fitting of a novel. I don't want to talk about the story at all in order to allow everyone a chance to view it with virgin eyes. To get the story across, there is a ton of dialogue. Much like the first game, Dreamfall allows its characters to talk and talk about their lives, what's going on in the world and the plot. While playing The Longest Journey isn't necessary per se, characters from it will show up in surprising ways, starting off from the very beginning. A small caveat about the story. Yes, the story doesn't end so much as set up events for a third game. However, if you look back at The Longest Journey, you would also find a game that doesn't end. It, too, basically explains what would happen in the second game and leaves so many threads open. Here's hoping the game sells well enough to merit a third game.
So here lies the crux. The reviews here and your enjoyment of the game will come to this: do you want a game that puts gameplay above story or a game that places story above gameplay. If you choose the former, you probably won't like this game as much. However, if you are like me and enjoy the latter, I can't recommend any other game higher than this one right now. I can normally overlook most flaws or gameplay issues in a game, if it keeps me enthralled with a terrific story. I enjoy story-centered games a ton. So I feel confident rating this game as a five star simply because I never had a dull moment. I compare both The Longest Journey and Dreamfall to novels. Very dense and filled with backstory, characters and plot, Dreamfall isn't a typical video game. You have to really want to get to know everything and everyone in it to get the most out of the game. If you want to really sink your teeth into a story and know everything there is to know about a fantastical world, there's no better place than Dreamfall.
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27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Bitter disappointment, October 7, 2006
Fun:1.0 out of 5 stars
I've played this game, as well as the original The Longest Journey (twice). I remember when TLJ came out, I was stunned by the quality of the voice acting, and the graphics were rich, truly excellent for the day, and the gameplay was adequate, with challenging puzzles and and an interesting story line. When the story ended it left me wanting more. I was hoping for a similar experience with Dreamfall, but it was a bitter disappointment.
First, the good, for there were some good things about this game (despite my rating). The voice acting was excellent, better than the original. The graphics were also quite good, very rich and detailed. The plot was interesting and captivating, as far as it went.
Now, the bad, and there is quite a bit of bad. Immediately, when I started playing, I noticed that simply controlling the game was extremely difficult. It took a good, solid 10 minutes just to learn basic controls for the main character. Yes, the controls were designed for console play, which is, IMHO, a mistake, but it is no excuse for the abysmal interface that was developed for this game. I've played many console games that had excellent interfaces.
The character and the camera were both difficult to control, and often I found myself struggling during gameplay to make both behave the way I wanted and expected them to behave. There were problems in a few caverns where the ceiling was so low that the camera would not stay in an appropriate place so that I could see what was going on around the character. Actually, enclosed areas in general were the bane of my gameplaying experience.
Picking objects to interact with was awkward as well. Since there was no direct way to pick objects, the developers created a very inexact system for picking the object closest to the character. For objects that were very close together, or far away, this made interaction difficult to manage. To combat this, they created a special "look" mode, where the character could look around, see objects to interact with, and then cycle through multiple objects that were in focus, but this really detracted from the overall gameplay since it had to be used so often to manage object focus but was such a slow way to interact with the scene. The look mode was also a bit difficult to control, since at 0 and 180 degrees there was a discontinutiy in the motion where the direction in which you moved the mouse had to be *reversed* to continue around the "look" circle. In addition, because this system was so inexact, actual object or scene interaction throughout the whole game seemed to have been kept to a bare minimum. This was a major frustration after the previous TLJ game, where objects could be clicked on using a mouse pointer for interaction, and there was a plethora of objects to actually interact with. One of the joys of the original TLJ was just finding things to click on and hearing April's response. That was gone in Dreamfall.
The combat system, while one of the most interesting aspects of gameplay, was also very shallow, and it was used so seldom I often found myself wondered, especially during the many, many moments when I wasn't in combat, "Why did they bother?" The original TLJ had no combat system, with any kind of in-game violence (as oppossed to out-of-game violence, like when you would take the keyboard and bash it over your monitor in frustration because a puzzle was driving you bonkers, not that I ever did that, heaven forfend) being handled in the same way as any other basic object interaction. After playing Dreamfall and using their combat system, I understood why TLJ didn't have a combat system of its own. It really wasn't necessary, and didn't add anything to the game.
Of course, I had just finished playing TLJ (again) before I purchased Dreamfall, so I was going from a reasonable interface to . . . this, so perhaps it hit me harder than it might have hit other people. On the other hand, it is a horrible interface, period.
So, aside from game control, there were also other problems, like the fact that there wasn't nearly as much actual *game* in this game as I expected. Oh, granted, I sat in front of my computer staring at the screen for quite a while as the game ate up processor time on my computer, about a good 20 or 25 hours or so, and very little of that time was actually spent loading or unloading or waiting because my computer couldn't handle the game (it could, no problem). The problem was that most of this time seemed to be composed of cutscenes and non-branching dialog. I felt like I was playing a movie! I can count on my fingers the number of long, important gameplay moments I was actually involved in, moments where I actually felt like I was accomplishing something. Sure, there were lots of moments of control stuck between the long, long sections of non-branching dialog and lengthy cut scenes, but many of those were so mind-numbingly simple that I can't possibly count them as being actually interactive. For instnace, and I'm not making this up I swear, there was one part where one of the main characters shows up in town, has a conversation (non-branching), and then you walk the character up some steps and open a door, and that's it! That's all the interaction you get for that section of gameplay! Really, what was the point?
Another thing I found rather pointless was that your character could die in this game. Now, normally, for most games, this wouldn't bother me, but it was just so... so... *Useless* in Dreamfall. There was little, or no, death in TLJ, but it seemed like everywhere you turned in Dreamfall there was another opportunity to get your character fried or shot or stunned or captured, and then it game over, man! Game over! You'd get a scene of your character dying, slowly, and you'd have to wait for the animation to finish before you could reload. I'm impatient, I know, but in a couple of places, where death was so well known that I might have called it "friend", that delay was immensely frustrating. I mean, I knew I'd screwed up, why make me suffer needlessly? I suppose that death added something in Dreamfall in a couple of places, but most of the time it just felt really unnecessary, an extra, added frustration when I really just wanted to focus on the puzzle.
And, speaking of puzzles, there were prescious few in Dreamfall. I'd say there were, perhaps, four, maybe five true puzzles in the game, none of them particularly difficult (except for one small part of a puzzle that was ridiculously difficult, where you had to know to notice something *before* you could possibly know that you had to notice it, and after the something happenned, it wouldn't happen again, so you couldn't notice it after you knew to notice it... If you can follow that, I'll give you a dollar.) Most of the rest of the "puzzles" were actually just chores with no actual challenge. A character in the game lays out exactly what you need to do, like "Go to person x, get object y, and bring it back to me," and then you do it, step by tedious step. Or, and I loved this (that was sarcasm), you would be confronted with a task, and then *your* character would say, unprompted, "Oh, *I* know what to do! I need to see person x about object y, so I can use it in this situation!" There were also several "puzzles" where the "puzzle" part seemed to be missing... What I mean is, is it really a puzzle when the only possible path is obvious and unavoidable? For instance, you need to get into a building to advance the story, and you don't know how, but since there are prescious few objects to interact with in the scene, and you don't have anything in your inventory, and when you look at an object in the scene and the game tells you, "I bet I could get in that building if I used that scene object," there really isn't any question about what to do. Right? Is that a puzzle?
I think I'm perilously close to ranting here, or, maybe I passed that threshold several paragraphs back... Well, there was only one more thing that I found objectionable: the story. It's not that the story was bad. As I said before, the plot was engaging, as far as it went. But, given that this is a game, and given that technology has advanced some since the old days of adventure gaming, doesn't it seem like playing the game should have, I donno, some kind of *impact* on the storyline? I mean, the game controls were abysmal. The combat was, let's face it, a joke. The puzzles were too easy. Wouldn't you think that there would at least be some kind of variability in the storyline to make up for these shortfalls? Some kind of impact that user choices might make on the plot? There were prescious few actual choices that could be made in the game... Shouldn't they have had some kind of purpose? As it was, it seemed like there was no choice, that the plotline was excruciatingly linear. The most frustrating part was that, especially towards the end, the main character was making choices that made no sense to me, and that I would never had made in her position, but the option to make a choice of my own was never given.
Also, the story seemed to fall appart towards the end, with events occurring that had no apparent logic to them. I'm not saying that there was no logic, but since the game left off without explaining, essentially, *anything*, all I was left with were a bunch of freak, nonsensical events that added up to a lot of chaos. Ugh, that was frustrating beyond belief. To make matters worse, the game ended unresolved, and I suspected that such was the case, but I ended up having to sit through something like ten minutes of wrap-up cutscenes that explained nothing *after* I'd come to this conclusion, just in case I was wrong and there was actually more gameplay. Maybe it only felt like 10...
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
OVERRATED, May 19, 2006
Fun:2.0 out of 5 stars
I sat for a while before writting this thinking what to say about the game, so here it goes. My reviewers tilt is high cause I love adventure games!!!
I was giddy like a school boy with his first crush when they announced Dreamfall but was worried that the turn to an action/adventure style with sneaking, fighting and such could damage the experence and it has.
This game suffers badly from consolitius having been seemingly designed with Xbox mainly in mind. As such it suffers from low resolution characters, backgrounds that clearly look painted and not alive and clunky controls. Gone is the next generation graphics(as in obilivion and HL2) to be replaced with graphics that look quite dated. The controls was designed with the Xbox in full mind, so gone is the mouse. The fighting action sequences are very poorly done and not at all designed well, often feeling more of like a button mashing contest. Combat as a whole should have been eliminated from this game if it was gonna be done this poorly, animations are subpar, actual combat controls are non-responsive often taking place a few seconds after you push the button...
The Story is not up to the name "The Longest Journey", another reviewer said it best....felt like they forgot to tie up the ending!!! And the game is short, to short for a 40buck game with flaws IMO
In a shrinking field of adventure games there are few pickings so beggers can't be choosers...I just wish funcom would remember who made them in the first place.... PCgamers!!!!
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