Mini-review of URU: PAth of the Shell

Introduction:

I have already reviewd URU:
	http://members.shaw.ca/murraypeterson/Uru.txt
 
URU: Path of the Shell (POTS for short) is another chapter in the
same game world, so you should read that review for my opinions
about the graphics and game engine.


Graphics (quality, animations, cut scenes):

I had just finished building a new computer, and it appeared that
POTS was going to be a complete no-show; my new graphics card (ATI
AIW 9600XT) just wouldn't display all of the textures, and no
combination of Win98SE drivers and settings would fix the problem.  I
finally broke down and installed XP on my machine, and the XP
graphics card drivers worked perfectly.  The faster card and CPU also
allowed me to run the game at 1280x1024 and FSAA turned on.  The
resulting graphics are very pretty, and much "crisper" than I could
ever get with my old MX400 video card.

Install/Uninstall:

Path of the Shell installs on top of URU, and adds some new journals
and linking books to your Relto bookshelf.  You can play POTS without
ever visiting anything from the original URU game; of course, you
must solve the cleft puzzles first in order to get to Relto.

The copy protection is fairly innocuous.  You only need the POTS CD
in your drive when the game first starts up; everything else is
installed to the hard drive.


Puzzles:

POTS is a puzzle game; there is no plot, no characters to talk to,
and not even any sort of underlying theme.  You get handed a small
mystery when you read a journal early on in the game, and everything
from that point onwards is dedicated to solving that seemingly simple
problem.  As a result, that's really all I can talk about -- the
puzzles.

We picked one of two linking books when we started, and found
ourselves in a world built to order for lovers of Myst-style puzzles.
Big mechanisms that you walked through, tried to understand, and
worked hard at figuring out the problem in addition to the solution
to that problem.  For my wife and I, it was pure puzzle heaven.  When
we got most of the way through this world, things started going downhill,
and they never really recovered from that point onwards in the game.

I regularly rant against timed puzzles, and POTS has found a new way
to annoy me with game driven timing.  At least three puzzles (
probably more without a walkthrough) require you to perform an action
and then wait for about 12 minutes in real time before anything
happens.  I can't tell you how irritating it is to be forced to turn
on the lights and watch a clock for over ten minutes.  Bleah.

Many of the puzzles in POTS force you to link repeatedly to and from
Relto.  If linking was a fast operation, this wouldn't be a problem,
but it's painfully slow, even on my new computer.  In one world, the
designers don't link you back to a useful location, but instead force
you to run around an entire island before making the next required
link.

I have a character that can swim in one world, but in another world,
a small stretch of water between some catwalks is completely
impassable.

One object couldn't be pushed out of the way, but required that you
actually found and clicked on its hot spot.

Some small gaps or ledges in a pathway were impassable, while other,
much larger gaps or ledges were passable by jumping.

We ran into a problem that required jumping skills beyond our
capabilties; only a walkthrough showed us a (non-intuitive) solution
that allowed us to continue.

We ran into several game bugs that allowed us to slip between the
polygons in the game world.  In one case, we were walking aroung
waist deep into a floor, and in another case, we fell under the
entire world.  Both cases required that we link back to Relto to get
out of our predicament.

We are certain that we hit a dead end on one world; after two hours
of trying to get out of it, we finally gave up and restored the game
from an earlier point and followed the walkthrough.

Due to various reasons, we learned to "save" our game by alt-tabbing
out of the game and making a copy of the sav directory.  This saved
us a large amount of backtracking when we got ourselves into a
strange "almost dead end".  There really is no excuse for the lack of
a save feature.

I believe the designers of POTS ran out of energy, or perhaps
inspiration.  Whatever the reason, they fell back on some lazy
solutions to problems, and they seemed to have used very simplistic
methods to use up the gamer's time.  Making me wait 10 minutes for
something to happen is infurating, as is making me run around an
island umpteen times.

Pros:

Pretty graphics, especially on a faster machine and good graphics card
Some good puzzles

Cons:

Long realtime delays
Repeated linking to/from Relto
Much running/swimming/climbing
No save feature
Graphics problems with ATI drivers under Win98

Conclusion:

Path of the Shell left us feeling tired.  Tired of watching the link
progress bar, tired of watching a real clock ticking away seconds,
tired of running/jumping/swimming/climbing, and eventually, tired of
playing the game at all.  POTS had the seeds of a good game at its
core, but the game designers dropped the ball.

If you enjoyed URU, then you will probably enjoy POTS, but for anyone
else, I really can't recommend this game.