Chronomaster I am going to bitch a lot about this game, not because it's bad, but because it's a good game at heart. The reason I am so irritated, is because the developers tried to hide a very good game under a lot of extraneous crud. Snark, mumble, grump, snort, hmmph. Oh well, on with the review... Graphics (quality, animations, cut scenes): Chronomaster is a third person point of view game. The graphics are pretty good, the various worlds and cutscenes look great. You get a lot of very pretty, very imaginative worlds to explore. Now for my first complaint; the designers were a bit too much in love with their pretty pictures, to the point of interfering with game play. The spaceship has three control panels, and you must watch an animated cut scene every time you switch between them, which is quite often. The first time, it is fun to watch, but after the fiftieth time, boy does it get tedious. Oh, you can't hit escape to bypass the cut scene either, it just shortens a portion of it. Sound (music, voices, special effects) Ok, but not great. The same snippet of music got really tedious when you kept encountering it in the maze. Sound recording was awful - poor level control, and poor relative levels. The character's voices were periodically drowned out by effects or music. Korda's voice acting by Ron Perlman was horrible -- monotone throughout. Everything was subtitled, so turning the sound off was sometimes the best option. Oh, you couldn't turn off the subtitles . Controls (user interface, save/restore, sound/video adjustments): Not the usual "smart" cursor we are used to today. You must pull down the control panel and select the verb you want, or use the right mouse button to cycle through the possible cursors (walk, push/pull, open/close, use, take, look, talk). On top of all that, you have the PDA and a "wand" to select from, as well as a large array of inventory objects. The end result of all this was a very large drop down menu which was almost always down, which interfered with the playing screen. Bugs or problems: The game had a quicksave feature, but the only time you can load the quicksaved game is if you die or start fresh from DOS. Other than that mis-design, the game worked flawlessly. Story (plot, theme, depth): Good. A unique, and fairly interesting science fiction story, with some pretty good depth to it. It came across as a bit melodramatic at times, but I tend to expect that from games, so I won't complain. Characters (depth, development, interaction): There are good guys and bad guys, but it's all pretty static. Basically, the character interaction consists of talking to characters to gain snippets on information; they aren't people, they are walking hints or obstacles. Puzzles (difficulty, uniqueness, suitability, ugliness, linearity): The puzzles were very non-linear -- you can solve puzzles multiple ways, in almost any order you want. This was bad in one sense, since we accidentally found one world's "final" puzzle first, which immediately ended that sequence. Another problem was that you found yourself solving a puzzle with no idea why because you didn't follow the sequence which would give you the right clues. For nasty puzzles, I will mention just a few: - a nasty 3D maze (took forever to walk through it) - a slider puzzle - a timed concentration game which randomly resets on every failure - conversation choices which result in death, and no possible way to know which choice is correct - silly, pointless puzzles which seemed to be added for no other reason than to extend the playing time - a "magnetic resonance tracer" which seemed to be a pointless add on throughout the game This game also suffers from "verb hunting"; you have at least 10 actions you can perform on any object, so much of the time is spent just trying everything and getting bored. Worse is that sometimes the obvious choice works and other times the obvious choice isn't the "correct" one. The worst problem I had with the game was the Conversation choices which will kill you, with absolutely no way of knowing what the correct choice is ahead of time. Save early, save often, because you WILL die a lot. Oh, and once you are inside a conversation tree, the game won't let you save at that point. This is an extremely hard game. I found myself consulting the walkthrough many, many times in this game. If you can solve it without a walkthrough, you are far more stubborn than I ever want to be. Pros: Good graphics, good cut scenes Interesting worlds to explore (truly unique) Good science fiction story to drive the game along Cons: Voice acting GUI design Extraneous puzzles Puzzles which kill you, but give yuo no hint about correct choices Far too difficult Conclusion: The development team for this game lost sight of the true game somewhere along the line. It's there, but you have to wade through extra controls, extraneous puzzles, and an elaborated control panel to get down to the core game. The end result for me was frustration, mostly because I was enjoying the game, and then all this "stuff" got in the way. If they had dropped the "magnetic resonance" doohickeys, and dropped some of the extraneous puzzles, they could have spent the money on better dialog and character interaction and simpler controls. The result would have been a great game. As it is, mediocre is about the best score I can give it Chronomaster is a good game at heart. If you can handle the frustration that will inevitably arise, then I would recommend that you play it. Otherwise, play Discworld 1 -- it's a much easier game.