Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This game was fun, but there were significant downfalls to it's layout:
PROS:
Excellent mystery soundtrack
Good acting from 14 of the 15 characters (the american woman with the accent that drifts in and out of a southern twang was the only letdown)
Good LONG gameplay
Extremely original plot
CONS:
REDUNDANT BORING SCENERY: I am the sort that doesn't typically LIKE to play games all the way through with a walkthrough. However after a short beginning, the scenery remained the same through the ENTIRE length of the game. Your character is on a five-car train, (restaraunt car, baggage car, salon car, and two residing-compartment cars). Without a change of things to look at, you will find yourself endlessly searching and REsearching the same brown/gray rooms on the train, ALL of which look identical with the exception of the passengers' luggage atop the racks. Once you find your list of clues, there is a short cinematic break, and you start all over again, interviewing the same list of characters, and searching the same rooms again for the next list of clues that spawned themselves after the last round. If the same old repetitive sceneries and gameplay styles don't bother you, then this shouldn't be an issue. I myself, like variety.
NO TUTORIAL: There was no tutorial, so from the get-go, it took a while just to learn how to move the character, go in and out of the inventory, inspect things, etc., and it wasn't until about 15 minutes to the end of the game I finally discovered that if you quickly double-click a doorway or direction, it will skip past the slow "step, step, step, step, step, step, turn doorknob, swing door open, walk inside" thing, and just allow your character to appear in the next room. Information that certainly would have been handy in the BEGINNING of the game.
INVENTORY MENUS: Combining items is a pain, and without a tutorial or any leads whatsoever, you wouldn't even know HOW to combine items. There is NOTHING in the game from the very beginning to the very end that explains the use of your inventory menus. I was well into the game before I knew that combining items was even possible, and that goes for reading your documents, studying the passenger passports etc. Your character will say things like "I will save this in my scrapbook for later use", without any way of knowing what the scrapbook is, how to gain access to it, how to flip through it once you've found it, yada yada, list goes on...
GAME-MAKERS ASSUME YOUR'E A ROCKET SCIENTIST BY NATURE, (you know, as most PC gamers are...): There is an extreme lack of guidance in certain areas where the game expects you to do things that without any REAL LIFE knowledge of criminal investigations, you would never know to do... For instance, there is a part where you are supposed to make a radio work to contact the outside world. After looking it up on the internet, I discovered that you have to place the bowl on the table, fill it with orange juice, put a small statue in it, wrap the statue in some bent copper (which you yourself had to custom bend from a passenger's bracelet, which you don't know how to do, because of the lack of explanation in combining items, the inventory menu thing again), and connect that to the radio, and then custom bend a butter knife, and pound a nail into the end of it to make a makeshift SOS transmitter key, and then connect some wiring back to the radio. Ahh, remember the good old days in college under the guidance of all our criminal justice professors, when we learned how to fix a radio with a fish bowl, orange juice, statue, copper bracelet, electric wiring, butterknife, hammer and a nail? ALWAYS a useful technique in the detective business... I guess I wouldn't have been irritated with the unlikely radio-fixing peice of this story, if there had even been ONE HINT ANYWHERE IN THE GAME that this was the solution to fixing the radio, ex., A "When Technology Fails" book on the shelf with hints for fixing broken electronic appliances out of household items, or, a letter found from someone, to someone, about items that are useful in fixing things... Just assuming that the gamer knows enough about electronics to put THAT ridiculous combination together was only one of several crazy assumptions the game-makers made.
Overall, this game would be best played from the beginning with a printed-out walkthrough at the ready. Still worth playing I suppose, but only for the amount I paid for it, which was a little over a dollar. Even if the lack of guidance weren't an issue, the dialogue and SAME scenery throughout would not be enough to capture most people's interest long enough to figure out the mystery, which is sad, because the first fiteen minutes are a real hoot.
Click Here to see more reviews about:
Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express (WIN 2000,XP,VISTA)
Click here for more information about Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express (WIN 2000,XP,VISTA)
